The interlanguage speech intelligibility benefit

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Abstract

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 backgrounds (n = 12) then performed a sentence recognition task with the recordings from the five talkers. Results showed that for native English listeners, the native English talker was most intelligible. However, for non-native listeners, speech from a relatively high proficiency non-native talker from the same native language background was as intelligible as speech from a native talker, giving rise to the "matched interlanguage speech intelligibility benefit." Furthermore, this interlanguage intelligibility benefit extended to the situation where the non-native talker and listeners came from different language backgrounds, giving rise to the "mismatched interlanguage speech intelligibility benefit." These findings shed light on the nature of the talker-listener interaction during speech communication.

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Most cited references 11

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A "Rationalized" Arcsine Transform

Gerald A. Studebaker (1985)

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Age of second-language acquisition and perception of speech in noise.

Stephen Mayo, M Florentine, S Buus (1997)

To determine how age of acquisition influences perception of second-language speech, the Speech Perception in Noise (SPIN) test was administered to native Mexican-Spanish-speaking listeners who learned fluent English before age 6 (early bilinguals) or after age 14 (late bilinguals) and monolingual American-English speakers (monolinguals). Results show that the levels of noise at which the speech was intelligible were significantly higher and the benefit from context was significantly greater for monolinguals and early bilinguals than for late bilinguals. These findings indicate that learning a second language at an early age is important for the acquisition of efficient high-level processing of it, at least in the presence of noise.

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Online processing of native and non-native phonemic contrasts in early bilinguals.

Núria Sebastian-Galles, Salvador Soto-Faraco (1999)

There is considerable debate about whether bilinguals can distinguish L2 phonemic contrasts as efficiently as first language speakers can. To test this issue, a group of highly proficient Spanish-dominant Catalan-Spanish bilinguals (who had been exposed to Catalan between the ages of 3 and 4, but who, previous to this age, had been exposed only to Spanish) and another group of Catalan-dominant bilinguals (who had been exposed to Catalan from birth) were compared in a gating task. We developed a variation of the gating procedure that included a two-alternative forced choice test after each fragment was played. The differences between the two alternatives consisted of phonemic contrasts existing in Catalan but not in Spanish. Four contrasts were tested: two vocalic contrasts [symbols: see text] and two consonantal contrasts [symbols: see text]. The results showed that Spanish-dominant bilinguals, even the subset who were able to make correct identifications at the last gate, systematically performed worse than the group of Catalan-dominant bilinguals, needing longer portions of the signal to be able to correctly identify the stimuli. We argue that these results support the hypothesis that L1 shapes the perceptual system at early stages of development in such a way that it will determine the perception of non-native phonemic contrasts, even if there is extensive and early exposure to L2.