AUTHOR=Jin Su-Hyun , Liu Chang 

TITLE=English vowel identification in quiet and noise: effects of listeners' native language background

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Neuroscience

VOLUME=8

YEAR=2014

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/neuroscience/articles/10.3389/fnins.2014.00305

DOI=10.3389/fnins.2014.00305

ISSN=1662-453X

ABSTRACT=<p><bold>Purpose:</bold> To investigate the effect of listener's native language (L1) and the types of noise on English vowel identification in noise.</p><p><bold>Method:</bold> Identification of 12 English vowels was measured in quiet and in long-term speech-shaped noise and multi-talker babble (MTB) noise for English- (EN), Chinese- (CN) and Korean-native (KN) listeners at various signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs).</p><p><bold>Results:</bold> Compared to non-native listeners, EN listeners performed significantly better in quiet and in noise. Vowel identification in long-term speech-shaped noise and in MTB noise was similar between CN and KN listeners. This is different from our previous study in which KN listeners performed better than CN listeners in <italic>English sentence recognition</italic> in MTB noise.</p><p><bold>Discussion:</bold> Results from the current study suggest that depending on speech materials, the effect of non-native listeners' L1 on speech perception in noise may be different. That is, in the perception of speech materials with little linguistic cues like isolated vowels, the characteristics of non-native listener's native language may not play a significant role. On the other hand, in the perception of running speech in which listeners need to use more linguistic cues (e.g., acoustic-phonetic, semantic, and prosodic cues), the non-native listener's native language background might result in a different masking effect.</p>