I have an accent and when people repeat what they think they heard I'm usually blown away. It's totally not what I said at all. I repeat what I said to a friend and they'd understand it perfectly well because they are now used to my accent. So the researcher and the article are wrong in that sense. Our brain absolutely fills in the gap and a slight change in accent will throw it off balance.

I've seen that in action. It's not only the accent, word choice also matters. Non-native speaker says something unusual, native speaker hears the nearest idiomatic phrase for the situation.

Brains make up a lot of stuff, not to mention the filtering already done before the signals travel there.

I’ve seen the things dementia brains can do to ignore the gaps in reality, and to build a consistent, but fake “reality”, and I wonder which kind of things, if any, is my brain trying to ignore right now, to keep also a consistent reality.

A much earlier example (showing the phenomenon isn't so new) is the famous "Cranberry Sauce"/"I buried Paul" vocal at the end of The Beatles' "Strawberry Fields Forever" (1967). It became one of the key ingredients in the fun "Paul is Dead" conspiracy/joke.

Similarly, if you ever get immersed into a language that you only know a little of, you soon realize your brain is way too good* at filling what it mis-hears or doesn't understand.

* And the real lesson is that it's good at feeling like it's understanding, even if it's understanding very little.

Is that why I always hear “O Christmas” at the beginning of every anime?

O Christmas'ed with the support of these sponsors?

Call me a buzzkill but I'm not impressed with this, things are misheard all the time, especially when you feed them through rough PCM sampling and then make a recording of it.

Even if I called you a "buzzkill", you might hear it as "fussyear".

It seems to me these illusions are a very small, tangible peek at the extensive differences in how people perceive the world around them.

I hear "Green Needle" 100% of the times if listening with headphones, I hear "Brainstorm" 100% times if listening with iphone X speakers.