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Thursday, May 28, 2015

Neuroscience

Neuroscience

ARTICLES AND NEWS FROM THE LATEST RESEARCH REPORTS.

Hard to Understand, Harder to Remember Struggling to understand someone else talking can be a taxing mental 
activity. A wide range of studies have already documented that 
individuals with hearing loss or who are listening to degraded speech –
 for example, over a bad phone line or in a loud room – have greater 
difficulty remembering and processing the spoken information than 
individuals who heard more clearly.Now researchers at Washington 
University in St. Louis are investigating the relatively unexplored 
question of whether listening to accented speech similarly affects the 
brain’s ability to process and store information. Their preliminary 
results suggest that foreign-accented speech, even when intelligible, 
may be slightly more difficult to recall than native speech. The 
researchers presented their findings at the 169th meeting of the 
Acoustical Society of America, held May 18-22, 2015 in Pittsburgh, 
Pennsylvania. Listening to accented speech is different than 
other more widely studied forms of “effortful listening” – think loud 
cocktail parties – because the accented speech itself deviates from 
listener expectations in (often) systematic ways, said Kristin Van 
Engen, a post-doctoral research associate in the linguistics program at 
Washington University in St. Louis. How the brain processes 
information delivered in an accent has relevance to real-world settings 
like schools and hospitals. "If you’re working hard to understand a 
professor or doctor with a foreign accent, are you going to have more 
difficulty encoding the information you’re learning in memory?” Van 
Engen asked. The answer is not really known, and the issue has received 
relatively little attention in either the scientific literature on 
foreign accent processing or the literature on effortful listening, she 
said.To begin to answer her question, Van Engen and her 
colleagues tested the ability of young-adult native English speakers to 
store spoken words in their short-term memory. The test subjects 
listened to lists of English words, voiced either with a standard 
American accent or with a pronounced, but still intelligible Korean 
accent. After a short time the lists would randomly stop and the 
listeners were asked to recall the last three words they had heard. All the volunteer listeners selected for the study were unfamiliar with a Korean accent.The
 listeners’ rate of recall for the most recently heard words was 
similarly high with both accents, but Van Engen and her team found that 
volunteers remembered the third word back only about 70 percent of the 
time when listening to a Korean accent, compared to about 80 percent 
when listening to a standard American accent. All of the words 
spoken with the accent had been previously tested to ensure that they 
were understandable before they were used in the experiment, Van Engen 
said. The difference in recall rates might be due to the brain using 
some of its executive processing regions, which are generally used to 
focus attention and integrate and store information, to understand words
 spoken in an unfamiliar accent, Van Engen said.The results are 
preliminary, and Van Engen and her team are working to gather data on 
larger sets of listeners, as well as to test other brain functions that 
require processing spoken information, such as listening to a short 
lecture and later recalling and using the concepts discussed. She said 
work might also be done to explore whether becoming familiar with a 
foreign accent would lessen the observed difference in memory functions.Van
 Engen hopes the results might help shape strategies for both listeners 
and foreign accented speakers to better communicate and ensure that the 
information they discussed is remembered. For example, it might help 
listeners to use standard strategies such as looking at the person 
speaking and asking for repetition. Accented speakers might be able to 
improve communication by talking more slowing or working to match their 
intonation, rhythm and stress patterns more closely to that of native 
speakers, Van Engen said.
Struggling to understand someone else talking can be a taxing mental activity. A wide range of studies have already documented that individuals with hearing loss or who are listening to degraded speech – for example, over a bad phone line or in a loud room – have greater difficulty remembering and processing the spoken information than individuals who heard more clearly.
Now researchers at Washington University in St. Louis are investigating the relatively unexplored question of whether listening to accented speech similarly affects the brain’s ability to process and store information. Their preliminary results suggest that foreign-accented speech, even when intelligible, may be slightly more difficult to recall than native speech./.../

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