Foreign accented speech: Energetic or informational masking?

Abstract

Normal‐hearing monolingual listeners whose native language is English experience a release from masking when the competing speech stimuli are spoken in a language other than English [e.g., K. J. Van Engen and A. R. Bradlow, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 121, 519 (2007)]. It is unclear whether this release is due to the fact that the masking speech is not spectrally matched to the target speech (energetic influence), or that listeners are unable to understand the masking speech and therefore find it less “distracting” when spoken in a non‐native language (informational influence). This study investigates listeners’ recognition of English speech presented in the presence of a continuum of five two‐talker babble maskers. The two‐talker maskers (all created using male voices) include English babble, Mandarin‐accented English babble with high intelligibility, Mandarin‐accented English babble with moderate intelligibility, Mandarin‐accented English babble with low intelligibility, and Mandarin babble. We hypothesize that, due to increased informational masking across the accented English continuum (from unaccented to heavily accented) in the masker speech, we will observe a increase in the target English speech intelligibility. These data will provide insight into the balance of energetic and informational influences on the release in masking observed for monolingual listeners when listening to English in a noncompeting masker language.