@article {5547,
	title = {Don{\textquoteright}t underestimate the benefits of being misunderstood},
	journal = {Psychological Science},
	year = {2017},
	abstract = {<p>Being a non-native speaker of a language poses challenges. Individuals often feel embarrassed by the errors they make when talking in their second language (L2). However, here we report an advantage of being an L2 speaker: native speakers give foreign-accented speakers the benefit of the doubt when interpreting their utterances, such that apparently implausible utterances delivered in a foreign accent are more likely to be interpreted in a plausible way. Across three replicated experiments, we demonstrate that native English speakers are more likely to interpret implausible utterances such as \&ldquo;the mother gave the candle the daughter\&rdquo; as similar plausible utterances (\&ldquo;the mother gave the candle to the daughter\&rdquo;) when those utterances are produced with a foreign accent. This result follows from the general model of language interpretation in a noisy channel (Gibson et al., 2013), under the hypothesis that listeners assume a higher error rate in foreign-accented speech.</p>
},
	url = {http://journals.sagepub.com/eprint/5IResZSFhWjyHkAk4a8n/full},
	author = {Gibson, Edward and Tana, Caitlin and Futrella, Richard and Mahowalda, Kyle and Lars Konieczny and Barbara Hemforth and Fedorenko, Evelina}
}
