Cross language effects on vowel perception in noise: Detection of English vowels spoken by English, Chinese, and Korean talkers.

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to measure detection thresholds for 12 isolated American English vowels spoken by English (E), Chinese (C), and Korean (K) talkers for young normal‐hearing listeners in the presence of a long‐term speech‐shaped noise presented at 70‐dB SPL. Two groups of talkers were selected from each Chinese and Korean talkers based on the vowel intelligibility found from the previous study [Jin et al., (2009)]: high and low intelligibility groups. Each group consisted of male and female talkers. Two English talkers (a male and female) were also included as a control. Preliminary analysis indicated that there was no statistically significant difference in the detection thresholds for vowels produced by native and non‐native talkers. However, thresholds for vowels differed by 20 dB across the 120 vowels (12 vowels × 10 talkers), which is consistent with Liu and Eddins (2008). It suggested that regardless of the language background of talkers, vowel detectability might be more influenced by vowel category and individual talker. The effect of acoustic features (both temporal and spectral cues) in each vowel on native English listeners’ detection thresholds will be discussed.