@article{ref1,
title="Don't underestimate the benefits of being misunderstood",
journal="Psychological science",
year="2017",
author="Gibson, Edward and Tan, Caitlin and Futrell, Richard and Mahowald, Kyle and Konieczny, Lars and Hemforth, Barbara and Fedorenko, Evelina",
volume="28",
number="6",
pages="703-712",
abstract="Being a nonnative speaker of a language poses challenges. Individuals often feel embarrassed by the errors they make when talking in their second language. However, here we report an advantage of being a nonnative speaker: Native speakers give foreign-accented speakers the benefit of the doubt when interpreting their utterances; as a result, apparently implausible utterances are more likely to be interpreted in a plausible way when delivered in a foreign than in a native accent. Across three replicated experiments, we demonstrated that native English speakers are more likely to interpret implausible utterances, such as &quot;the mother gave the candle the daughter,&quot; as similar plausible utterances (&quot;the mother gave the candle to the daughter&quot;) when the speaker has a foreign accent. This result follows from the general model of language interpretation in a noisy channel, under the hypothesis that listeners assume a higher error rate in foreign-accented than in nonaccented speech.<p /> <p>Language: en</p>",
language="en",
issn="0956-7976",
doi="10.1177/0956797617690277",
url="http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0956797617690277"
}