ABSTRACT
In our highly interconnected and technological society, cross-cultural conversations are progressively increasing, resulting in heightened exposure to foreign-accented speech. These modern social interactions present unique challenges in mutual understanding and efficient communication. This chapter provides a brief overview of the cognitive processes involved in foreign-accented speech comprehension, and the manners in which these mechanisms differ from native-accented speech processing. Behavioral and neural correlates of foreign accent perception are summarized, with a special focus on semantic and syntactic processing. In providing an organized description of the current scientific findings, the chapter concludes by identifying unanswered questions and suggests future research directions.
