The influence of fluency: investigating foreign accents neurolinguistically

How do we accommodate when communicating with a foreign accented speaker of our native language? Multilingualism is omnipresent in human populations across the planet, and with globalisation facilitating mobility more and more, it’s already a very important feature of our own daily life in the Western world.
For my undergraduate dissertation, I joined a project studying the neural organisation of language processing; specifically, how it is influenced by the fluency of the speaker we listen to. To investigate this, we conducted an EEG experiment, measuring N400 effects occurring at unexpected endings to highly predictable sentences. Similar studies have used this method to determine our anticipation of upcoming words in discourse, though only in monolingual settings. For this experiment, we did a within-subjects study on native Dutch speakers, comparing the effects of them listening to other native speakers of Dutch vs. listening to non-native speakers of Dutch. One might for instance imagine that native speakers would anticipate non-native speakers to use more incorrect grammatical forms; as a consequence, we would then expect to measure a decreased N400 effect when they hear a foreign accented speaker using a determiner of the wrong gender for an expected noun, as compared to the effect when hearing a native speaker do the same. Indeed, we noticed some interesting differences, specifically concerning the occurrence of the Phonological Mismatch Negativity (PMN) vs. the N400 effect. During my talk, I will present the results we found, and expand upon the possible implications for the neurolinguistic analysis of multilingual communication.