Recognition of English vowels, consonants, words, and sentences for Chinese college students

Abstract

The goals of this study were to first, investigate the recognition of several types of English speech sounds such as vowels, consonants, words, and sentences in quiet and long-term speech-shaped (LTSS) noise for Chinese college students; second, examine relationship among the perception of these speech materials, e.g., whether students with better sentence recognition also showed better phonemic perception. Speech stimuli included twelve isolated English vowels, twenty-one English consonants in the /aCa/ context, NU6 words, the coordinate response measure (CRM), Hearing in noise test (HINT) sentences, and IEEE sentences. Preliminary data analysis indicated that at the phonetic level, Chinese students performed significantly better in consonant identification than in vowel identification; at the word level, students did significantly with CRM than NU6; and at the sentence level, students had significantly higher recognition scores for HINT sentences than for IEEE sentences. The correlations among the recognition of these speech materials will examined and discussed. [Work supported by China National Natural Science Foundation 31628009.]