University Presentation Showcase: Undergraduate Poster Gallery
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Creation Date
Spring 2020
Major
Psychology
Department
Psychology
Degree
Undergraduate
Mentor
Sara Incera
Mentor Department
Psychology
Abstract
For every one native speaker there are two foreign-accented speakers of English. Using MouseTracker, we randomly assigned 108 participants to view a happy, a sad, or to not view a video. Then, we asked them to rate the accents of the speakers on a scale from “Native” to “Foreign”. Half of the words in the videos were spoken by native speakers, and the other half were spoken by foreign speakers. Results indicate that participants took more time to rate the accent of the foreign speakers, showing that more effort is needed to process foreign accents. Results also indicate that participants who viewed the sad video rated the accent levels of the foreign speakers more neutral than participants who viewed the happy video or no video. This effect might be due to the fact that feeling sad takes up cognitive resources, so participants have less cognitive capacity to be able to rate the foreign accents. Overall, the findings suggest that mood affects listener's ratings of foreign accents.
