Comparing Native Chinese Listeners' Speech Reception Thresholds for Mandarin and English Consonants

Abstract

The presence of noise can greatly affect listeners' speech perception. Previous studies have demonstrated that nonnative listeners' speech perception performance is reduced more than natives' in noise conditions. Most previous studies have focused on the effects of different noise types on non-native speech perception, and using a fixed signal to noise ratio level in different perception tasks. However, the masking effect of noise may be different for individual speech sounds, therefore leaving an incomplete picture of non-native speech perception in noise conditions. The current study applies an adaptive procedure to dynamically adjust the signal to noise ratio to measure listeners' Speech Reception Threshold (SRT) in noise conditions. More specifically, a group of native Chinese listeners' SRTs for Mandarin and English consonants in Speech Shaped Noise were measured and compared. The results showed that Chinese listeners' mean SRT for Mandarin consonants was 3.6dB lower than that for English consonants, indicating a general native language advantage. However, detailed analysis has revealed the mean SRT for the 5 most noise-tolerable consonants in Mandarin was 2.6dB higher than that in English. This result suggests that non-native speech perception in noise conditions may not always be more difficult than native ones. The acoustic features of different sounds could affect their intelligibility in noise conditions.