Non-native perception of regionally accented speech of competing talkers

Abstract

Noisy conditions are challenging to non-native listeners who typically underperform relative to native listeners when attending to several competing talkers. We examine whether non-native listeners can utilize dialect-related cues in the target and in the masking speech, even if they do not reach the proficiency level of the native listeners. Our previous work with highly proficient Indonesian-English bilinguals (Fox et al., 2014) found that their performance differed markedly from native English listeners when the speech levels of the competing talkers were equal (0 dB SNR). We hypothesized that bilinguals cannot effectively separate utterances at 0 dB SNR due to a lack of a sufficient contrast in the voice levels of competing talkers, which may reduce their ability to benefit from the phonetic-acoustic details in order to “follow” a particular talker. The current study sought to replicate and validate earlier findings with a different group of bilinguals. The same experiment was conducted with Korean-English bilinguals. The results were replicated, providing further evidence that the ability to benefit from fine-grained phonetic details in regional accents declines for non-native listeners when the speech levels of the competing talkers are equal. Discussion will focus on defining the nature of the non-native speech processing deficit.