How well can we understand each other? Does our experience listening to non-native speakers help or hinder our ability to understand when listening situations are difficult? Apparently, we may actually be biased based on our experience. In a study reported in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, researchers found that those with experience interacting with Chinese Canadians had a slight bias toward misunderstanding native-speaking Chinese Canadians as compared with white Canadians when they were shown a photo of the speaker. They showed no difference in their ability to correctly transcribe the speech of the two groups when no photos were shown. Read more about the findings here.
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