Accent categorisation by lay listeners: Which type of ’native ear’ works better?

Listeners, be they lay or expert, can to a greater or lesser extent distinguish and correctly identify different accents of familiar languages. This ability plays a central role across a spectrum of speech perception-based activities, not the least of which are speaker profiling and comparison of the sort carried out for forensic purposes. Factors that affect listeners’ abilities to identify different accents, such as their native linguistic competence and their level of familiarity with the target variety, have been reported extensively in the literature. However, we currently lack data from studies that make direct comparisons of listeners’ abilities to correctly categorise foreign-accented varieties of a language they speak natively (L1 listeners) against the competence of non-native speakers of that language (L2 listeners), where the aim of the listening task is to categorise familiar and unfamiliar foreign accents of the language. The present study is designed to investigate these issues by looking at how well a listener’s “native ear” allows him or her to judge the origins of non-native speakers of English. By “native ear”, we mean in the present case the sort of perceptual acuity that we might associate with being an L1 English speaker versus an L1 Chinese speaker who speaks English as an L2, in the situation where speakers of these two sorts are exposed to recordings of Chinese-accented English (CE). For the experiment reported in this paper, the speakers recruited were L2 English speakers from East Asia (Japan, South Korea, and three regions of China), with the principal interest being in those in the Chinese group. A total of 42 listeners (monolingual L1 English speakers vs. Chinese L2 English speakers) completed a dual-task forced-choice experiment in which they were exposed to samples of English spoken by the East Asian talkers. The results showed that the L1 Chinese listeners were significantly better than the L1 English listeners at distinguishing the CE speakers from the Japanese and South Korean ones. However, neither of the two types of “native ear” was better than the other (or indeed in absolute terms) at correctly categorising the three subvarieties of CE according to three broadlydefined geographical/dialect regions (the North, South, and West of China). We conclude by discussing the relevance of our results to forensic cases in which an analogous kind of categorisation task might be necessitated.