# Perception of Familiar Second Language Accents and the Role of Linguistic Background
## 4 Discussion  
This study examined the differences in the ability of bilingual and multilingual Greek listeners to categorize talkers in a condition involving an L2 accent and L1-accented L2 speech. The L2 accent was English, while the L1-accented L2 speech was Greek-accented English. Listeners performed an online categorization task in which they were asked to categorize talkers as originating either from England or Greece based on their audio recordings. The statistical analysis has been conducted using a binomial logistic mixed  
\begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{c c c c c c} \hline \hline  & \(\beta\) & \(SE\) & \(z\) & \(p\) & \\ \hline (Intercept) & \(3.389\) & \(0.720\) & \(4.706\) & \(<\)0.001 & *** \\ background[multilingual] & \(0.688\) & \(0.448\) & \(1.534\) & \(0.125\) & \\ origin[Greece] & \(-1.321\) & \(0.408\) & \(-3.244\) & \(0.002\) & ** \\ background[multilingual]:origin[Greece] & \(-0.659\) & \(0.537\) & \(-1.227\) & \(0.219\) & \\ \hline \hline \multicolumn{8}{l}{Signif. codes: \(0^{***}\)\(0.001\)\({}^{***}\)\(effects model. To verify the results, a bias-free measure based on SDA was used, which provided measures of sensitivity and bias. Both groups presented with high above chance scores in the general accent condition and the accent condition per talker origin. For Greek-accented English, this corroborates earlier findings proposing the easy identification or intelligibility of a non-native talker by a non-native listener with whom they share an L1 (e.g., [16; 17; 18]). [PERSON] and [PERSON] [16] introduced the term \"matched interlanguage speech intelligibility benefit\" to describe high speech intelligibility between a non-native talker and a non-native listener who both speak the same L1. A possible explanation is that talkers and listeners share the same knowledge of the target language's structure, and they use at the same time general strategies while learning how to perceive and produce the non-native language. As Greek talkers may not have managed to master all phonetic details of English, they may develop and use their universal interlanguage patterns interlocally, which can easily be recognized by Greek listeners. So, these listeners may search for particular familiar acoustic cues in the accented L2 speech of Greek talkers, which will allow them to decode the identity of the talkers. For English, the high scores may have stemmed from the fact that listeners were taught the target English variety, use English regularly, and frequently have exposure to English. We anticipated significant differences between bilinguals and multilinguals in the accent categorization task. However, our hypothesis was rejected. As previously noted, listeners can easily identify phonetic cues in accented L2 speech produced by talkers who share the same L1 as the listeners. They can also easily identify familiar L2 accents. Both bilinguals and multilinguals have experience with both English and Greek-accented English; this might explain the absence of differences in categorization accuracy between the two groups. Therefore, the variation exposure effect identified by [PERSON] [9], which indicated an advantage for multilinguals over bilinguals in categorizing familiar versus unfamiliar L2 accents, does not hold true in this context. Taking into account that humans have finite abilities when multitasking [29], challenging speech comprehension situations strain the human capacity to process information, as extensive cognitive resources are consumed when attempting to understand unclear speech. In the context of this study, the listening conditions were not challenging due to the familiarity of the listeners with both accents, which led to similar performance by both groups. An additional interesting result emerges when examining the performance of listeners in each origin condition. Specifically, Greek listeners were able to more accurately categorize Greek-accented English talkers compared to English talkers.