Listeners' attitudes toward accented talkers uniquely predicts accented speech perception

Listeners' sensitivity to indexical information influences their ability to perceive and remember speech, but it is less clear if listeners' subjective ratings of talker characteristics also impact speech perception ability. The present experiment tested the increase in variance accounted for by listeners' ratings of foreign accented talkers' manner of speaking and of the talkers themselves beyond the variance already accounted for by listeners' age, executive function, and hearing thresholds. Adding listeners' ratings significantly improved model fit, indicating that listeners' subjective experience of talker impacts speech perception accuracy along with objective listener characteristics such as hearing thresholds or executive function. (C) 2017 Acoustical Society of America