Effects of linguistic background and noise on perception of fricatives

Abstract

This study examined how native American English (AE) speakers perceived fricatives spoken by native AE and Bangladeshi Bengali (BB) speakers in quiet and noise. Participants included seven normal-hearing adults between 20 to 26 years of age. Participants listened to speech tokens of five fricatives, /s/, /z/, /∫/, /f/, and /v/ in the initial, medial, and final positions in the context of the point vowels /a/, /u/, /i/. Multitalker babble (MTB), speech noise, and three narrow bands of noise, 1000–2000 Hz, 2000–4000 Hz, and 500–5000 Hz at 45 dB SPL, 65 dB SPL and 85 dB SPL were used. The results suggested that listeners perceived fricatives significantly better when spoken by AE compared to BB speakers, and in quiet than in noise, especially in MTB. Listeners had the most difficulty with /z/, followed by /s/, /v/, /f, and /∫/ respectively, when tokens were spoken by BB speakers. This study may have implications for accent reduction therapy as well as for teaching English to English-language learners, especially when the phonology of the learners’ native language differs greatly from that of AE. Further studies are warranted especially due to an increasingly growing non-AE speaking population in the United States.