Recent studies suggest that content delivered in heavily accented speech may be harder for listeners to remember. The same problem also occurs for listeners with hearing difficulties. It may be neurological, not cultural-bias or lack of exposure.
Van Engen and her colleagues tested the ability of young-adult native English speakers to store spoken words in their short-term memory. The test subjects listened to lists of English words, voiced either with a standard American accent or with a pronounced, but still intelligible Korean accent. After a short time the lists would randomly stop and the listeners were asked to recall the last three words they had heard.All the volunteer listeners selected for the study were unfamiliar with a Korean accent.The listeners’ rate of recall for the most recently heard words was similarly high with both accents, but Van Engen and her team found that volunteers remembered the third word back only about 70 percent of the time when listening to a Korean accent, compared to about 80 percent when listening to a standard American accent.
