Clear communication is crucial in a multilingual world, but different accents can sometimes make understanding harder. Much research looks at how speakers of English as an additional language can become more intelligible, yet we still know less about how first-language (L1) English listeners adapt to accented speech. My research focuses on the role of auditory processing in that adaptation, asking whether sensitivity to pitch, rhythm, and spectral cues explains why some listeners find accented speech easier to understand than others.

Auditory processing supports speech perception by helping us track phoneme contrasts, stress, and phrase boundaries — skills that become especially important when familiar patterns are disrupted by an accent. For example, Mandarin-accented English is often more reliant on pitch cues, while first-language English listeners tend to depend more on duration and spectral information. In my MSc work, listeners with stronger pitch sensitivity and melodic memory were better at perceiving prosodic features in Mandarin-accented English. My PhD builds on this by testing whether those mechanisms generalise across a wider range of accents.

The project has three aims: to create an open-access corpus of accented English, to investigate how auditory processing predicts adaptation, and to test whether combined auditory–speech training improves comprehension more than speech-only training. Alongside advancing theories of speech perception, this work has practical implications — from supporting teachers and clinicians to improving communication in multilingual workplaces.