Can Articulating Aloud Offset Effects of Listening to L1 in a Foreign Accent?

Abstract

The production effect refers to the finding that words that are read aloud are more distinctive and memorable relative to words that are read silently. The present study explored the production effect using auditory stimuli, spoken in two different accents. American participants repeated a word or listened passively to words spoken in either their native accent (English) or a foreign accent (Chinese). In both recall and recognition, memory was better for words that were read aloud rather than listened to, thereby extending the production effect from the visual to the auditory domain. However, the benefit to recognition associated with repeating a word , rather than listening to it, was greater in a native accent. Evidently, the gestures of articulating a word aloud benefit memory but its impact is attenuated by phonetic mismatch between what participants hear and what they produce.


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