Understanding how cultural variables influence communicative interaction is crucial for speech-language pathologists, who increasingly come from diverse cultural backgrounds and also provide services to a culturally diverse clientele. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effect of a cultural variable, namely familiar and unfamiliar accent, on the speech discrimination and phrase repetition performance of 8 nondemented, elderly individuals (aged 71–86 yrs) and 6 individuals (aged 70–78 yrs) diagnosed with dementia of the Alzheimer type (DAT). Results obtained on the Wilcoxon signed-rank nonparametric test demonstrated that an unfamiliar accent significantly and adversely affected the test performance of both groups. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)