Implicit biases in monolingual and bilingual speech perception

Accented speech shows a great deal of variation from the “native” norms that can lead to processing difficulty. Previous research on listeners’ performance on accented speech shows that the more varieties of accented speech the listeners are exposed to, the better their processing is (Baese-Berk, Bradlow, & Wright, 2013). Since many bilingualism studies suggest that bilinguals have advantages in allocating different resources such as attention during language processing (Costa, Hernández, & Sebastián-Gallés, 2008), there is a necessity to investigate bilingual listeners' processing of accented speech. In this pilot experiment, we will measure intelligibility and perceived degrees of accentedness of Tamil and British English presented in noise among American English monolinguals, and American English and Spanish Bilinguals. We will also perform different cognitive tests as well as an Implicit Association Test to see if prior implicit biases towards South Asian individuals affect the listeners’ intelligibility and accentedness rating scores. We hypothesize that bilinguals will be more accurate in the intelligibility task compared to monolinguals due to their exposure to more than one language. However, it remains to be seen whether this advantage will be equally realized in both varieties of English accented speech.