Walker, Kayla Jane2020-09-292020-09-292020https://hdl.handle.net/1794/2582340 pagesNonnative-accented speech is more difficult for native listeners to understand than native-accented speech. However, listeners can improve their abilities to understand nonnative-accented speech through exposure and training. The goal of this project was to explore whether exposing native listeners to different sentence types affects listeners' adaptation to nonnative-accented speech. Listeners were trained on high predictability sentences (e.g., "The color of a lemon is yellow"), low predictability sentences (e.g., "Mom said that it is yellow"), or semantically anomalous sentences (e.g., "The green week did the page"). Previous research has demonstrated that semantic predictability impacts speech perception, but its influence on adaptation to nonnative-accented speech is unclear. This experiment indicated that there is no generalizable advantage to training on high predictability versus low predictability versus semantically anomalous sentence types.en-USLinguisticsspeechadaptationaccentperceptionlistenersemanticsThesis/Dissertation