Tessa Bent

Biographic Data

ID3821499
NAMETessa Bent
GIVEN NAMESTessa
FAMILY NAMEBent
SIGNATUREBENT T
AFFILIATIONSIndiana University Bloomington
ORCID0000-0001-7604-1835
VERIFIEDYes
TOTAL WORKS13
TOTAL CITATIONS53
WORKS AS AUTHOR13
WORKS AS EDITOR0
FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR2003
LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR2025
H-INDEX4

  • “They sure aren’t from around here”

    Open AccessMalachi Henry, Tessa Bent et al.ARTICLEJournal of Child Language2025

    Children exhibit preferences for familiar accents early in life. However, they frequently have more difficulty distinguishing between first language (L1) accents than second language (L2) accents in categorization tasks. Few studies have addressed children’s perception of accent strength, or the relation between accent strength and objective measures of pronunciation distance. To address these gaps, 6- and 12-year-olds and adults ranked talkers’ …

  • Perception of regional and nonnative accents

    Open AccessTessa Bent, Holly Lind-Combs et al.ARTICLELinguistics Vanguard2024

    Online testing for behavioral research has become an increasingly used tool. Although more researchers have been using online data collection methods, few studies have assessed the replicability of findings for speech intelligibility tasks. Here we assess intelligibility in quiet and two noise-added conditions for several different accents of English (Midland American, Standard Southern British, Scottish, German-accented, Mandarin-accented, Japan…

  • Relating pronunciation distance metrics to intelligibility across English accents

    Open AccessTessa Bent, Malachi Henry et al.ARTICLEJournal of Phonetics2024Cited by: 3References: 63

    Unfamiliar accents can cause word recognition challenges, particularly in noisy environments, but few studies have incorporated quantitative pronunciation distance metrics to explain intelligibility differences across accents. To address this gap, intelligibility was measured for 18 talkers -- two from each of three first-language, one bilingual, and five second-language accents -- in quiet and two noise conditions. The relations between two edit…

  • Development of unfamiliar accent comprehension continues through adolescence

    Open AccessTessa BentARTICLEJournal of Child Language2018

    School-age children's understanding of unfamiliar accents is not adult-like and the age at which this ability fully matures is unknown. To address this gap, eight- to fifteen-year-old children's (n = 74) understanding of native- and non-native-accented sentences in quiet and noise was assessed. Children's performance was adult-like by eleven to twelve years for the native accent in noise and by fourteen to fifteen years for the non-native accent …

  • Shhh… I Need Quiet! Children’s Understanding of American, British, and Japanese-accented English Speakers

    Open AccessTessa Bent, Rachael Frush HoltARTICLELanguage and Speech2018

    Children's ability to understand speakers with a wide range of dialects and accents is essential for efficient language development and communication in a global society. Here, the impact of regional dialect and foreign-accent variability on children's speech understanding was evaluated in both quiet and noisy conditions. Five- to seven-year-old children ( n = 90) and adults ( n = 96) repeated sentences produced by three speakers with different a…

  • Perception of Nonnative-accented Sentences by 5- to 8-Year-olds and Adults

    Open AccessTessa Bent, Eriko AtagiARTICLELanguage and Speech2017Cited by: 4References: 61

    To acquire language and successfully communicate in multicultural and multilingual societies, children must learn to understand speakers with various accents and dialects. This study investigated adults’ and 5- to 8-year-old children’s perception of native- and nonnative-accented English sentences in noise. Participants’ phonological memory and phonological awareness were assessed to investigate factors associated with individual differences in w…

  • Classification of regional dialects, international dialects, and nonnative accents

    Open AccessTessa Bent, Eriko Atagi et al.ARTICLEJournal of Phonetics2016Cited by: 11References: 51

  • Children's perception of foreign-accented words

    Open AccessTessa BentARTICLEJournal of Child Language2014

    The acoustic-phonetic realizations of words can vary dramatically depending on a variety of within- and across-talker characteristics such as regional dialect, native language, age, and gender. Robust word learning requires that children are able to recognize words amidst this substantial variability. In the current study, perception of foreign-accented words was assessed in four- to seven-year-old children to test how one form of variability inf…

  • Auditory free classification of nonnative speech

    Open AccessEriko Atagi, Tessa BentARTICLEJournal of Phonetics2013Cited by: 7References: 29

  • Perceptual adaptation to non-native speech

    Open AccessAnn Bradlow, Ann R Bradlow et al.ARTICLECognition2008

  • The interlanguage speech intelligibility benefit for native speakers of Mandarin

    Open AccessRachel Hayes‐harb, Rachel Hayes-Harb et al.ARTICLEJournal of Phonetics2008Cited by: 20References: 25

  • Ladies first? Phonology, frequency, and the naming conspiracy

    Open AccessSaundra K Wright, J Hay et al.ARTICLELinguistics2005Cited by: 8

    In pairs of names, male names often precede female names (e.g. Romeo and Juliet). We investigate this bias and argue that preferences for name ordering are constrained by a combination of gender, phonology, and frequency. First, various phonological constraints condition the optimal ordering of binomial pairs, and findings from our corpus investigations show that male names contain those features which lend them to be preferred in first position,…

  • The interlanguage speech intelligibility benefit

    Tessa Bent, Ann Bradlow et al.ARTICLEThe Journal of the Acoustical…2003

    This study investigated how native language background influences the intelligibility of speech by non-native talkers for non-native listeners from either the same or a different native language background as the talker. Native talkers of Chinese (n=2), Korean (n=2), and English (n=1) were recorded reading simple English sentences. Native listeners of English (n=21), Chinese (n=21), Korean (n=10), and a mixed group from various native language ba…