Little research to date has examined how listeners integrate cues to non-native speaker identity in real time sentence processing. Here, we examine listeners’ interpretation of the semantic and socio-pragmatic content of utterances produced by either a foreign accented speaker or a native speaker. Overall, our findings suggest that processing speed was slower in the presence of foreign accents. However, the extra perceptual demands of processing unfamiliar accents did not translate into listeners’ accuracy rates, and in certain sentence contexts, non-native speakers were also more likely to elicit higher semantic or pragmatic interpretation accuracy. Our findings show that non-native speaker identity plays an important role in listeners’ sentence interpretations.

Speaking in a foreign accent has often been thought to carry many disadvantages. Here we probe the social evaluation of foreign-accented vs. native speakers using spoken utterances that either obey or violate the pragmatic principle of Informativeness. We show that listeners form different impressions of native and non-native speakers with identical pragmatic behavior: specifically, in contexts where violations of Informativeness can be detrimental to or misleading for the listener, people rated underinformative speakers more negatively on trustworthiness and interpersonal appeal compared to informative speakers, but this tendency was mitigated in some cases for speakers with foreign accents. Furthermore, this mitigating effect was strongest for less proficient non-native speakers who were presumably not fully responsible for their linguistic choices. Contrary to previous studies, we also find no consistent global bias against non-native speakers. Thus the fact that non-native speakers have imperfect control of the linguistic signal affects pragmatic inferences and social evaluation in ways that can lead to surprising social benefits.