Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The present accent rating study investigates the interactionbetween accent strength and grammatical correctness on per-ceived accentedness. German native (L1) listeners rated Ger-man sentences produced by L1 and non-native (L2) speakers.Sentences either contained a grammatical error or were gram-matically correct. Results showed that grammatical correct-ness affected the accent rating of sentences produced by L1speakers, but not of those by L2 speakers. The inverse influ-ence of grammatical errors on sentences spoken with strongeraccents suggests that phonological information plays a moreimportant role for global perception of speech accentednessthan grammatical correctness does, revealing a hierarchical im-portance of factors that form an L2 accent. This finding is inline with recent findings from an online processing ERP study(Hanul ́ıkov ́a, van Alphen, van Goch, & Weber, 2012) in whichL1 listeners were tolerant towards grammatical errors made byL2 speakers, i.e. showed no P600 effect for grammatically in-correct sentences.