Presentation

Rethinking the multilingual advantage in accent perception: Mixed-effects evidence from L1 listeners

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Abstract

This study examines whether multilingual experience might provide a general listening advantage for first language (L1) English users across multiple English accents. To address this, we analyze two constructs of listening: perceived ease of understanding (comprehensibility) and word recognition (intelligibility) for L1 English listeners who self-reported as monolingual or multilingual. Listeners rated the comprehensibility of longer passages and transcribed short sentences produced by speakers representing General American (GA), Regional American (Texas: TX), General British (GB), Regional British (Newcastle: RB), and Ghanaian English (GN). Mixed-effects analyses revealed a clear accent effect on comprehensibility (GA > others) with no main effect of multilingualism and no interaction between the variables of accent and multilingualism. For intelligibility, we observed a strong accent effect and a significant accent and multilingualism interaction. Monolinguals performed better on the intelligibility task, although not statistically significant on familiar/standard accents (GA, GB), whereas multilinguals showed a nonsignificant advantage on less-familiar accents (GN, RB). These findings signify that multilingual status may not be an important variable for listening comprehension and intelligibility, especially compared to previous research findings on accent familiarity, contact hypothesis, and cognitive dissonance approaches.

 

Keywords: comprehensibility, intelligibility, multilinguals, speech perception

How to Cite:

Grixoni, F., & Holmberg, A. (2026). Rethinking the multilingual advantage in accent perception: Mixed-effects evidence from L1 listeners. In P. Trofimovich, A. Bodea, T.-N. N. Le, R. Suzuki, & C. Teló (Eds.), Proceedings of the 16th Pronunciation in Second Language Learning and Teaching Conference (pp. 1–15). Concordia University, Montreal, Canada, October 2025. https://doi.org/10.31274/psllt.21308