Highly proficient L2 speakers still need to attend to a talker’s mouth when processing L2 speech

ABSTRACT

Adults attend to a talker’s mouth whenever confronted with challenging speech processing situations. We investigated whether L2 speakers also attend more to the mouth and whether their proficiency level modulates such attention. First, in Experiment 1, we presented native speakers of English and Spanish with videos of a talker speaking in their native and non-native language while measuring eye-gaze to the talker’s face. As predicted, participants attended more to the talker’s mouth in response to non-native than native speech. Then, Experiment 2 explored whether language proficiency affects attention to the talker’s eyes and mouth when perceiving non-native, second-language speech. Results indicated that non-native speakers attended more to the mouth than native speakers, regardless of their level of L2 expertise. These results not only confirm that attention to a talker’s mouth increases whenever speech-processing becomes more challenging, but crucially, they show that this is also true in highly competent L2 speakers.

KEYWORDS:

• Audiovisual speech perception
• selective attention
• face perception
• second-language perception
• non-native speech processing

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación, Grant PSI2014-55105-P and PGC2018-097487-B-100 to FP and LB and by the National Science Foundation, Grant BCS-1946115 to DJL.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author, [J. B.], upon reasonable request.

Notes

1 Link to the questionnaire used in the USA: https://forms.gle/raCZpBtXbL4fCT1K6 Link to the questionnaire used in Spain: https://forms.gle/mot9W3faCp4RdzWGA

2 The same pattern of results is obtained when using only the Catalan, only the Spanish or an average of both languages.

3 Although the results are reported in PTLT Scores, the whole analysis was repeated using the raw scores, and the results yielded the same significant effects and the conclusions remained the same.

4 As a reference of the English level of the students, the CEFRL B1 (Intermediate) level is defined as someone who can understand the main points of clear standard input on familiar matters, can deal with most travelling situations in that language, and can produce simple connected text on familiar topics. The CEFRL C2 (highly proficient) level is defined as someone who can understand with ease virtually everything heard or read, can summarise information from different sources in a coherent presentation, and can express him/herself spontaneously, very fluently and precisely, differentiating finer shades of meaning even in more complex situations.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación, [grant number PSI2014-55105-P] and [grant number PGC2018-097487-B-100] to FP and LB and by the National Science Foundation, [grant number BCS-1946115] to DJL.