Release in linguistic masking changes over time: differences between native and non-native listeners

Abstract

Research into speech-on-speech masking has identified what is known as release from linguistic masking, i.e., better speech transcription performance against a masker in an unknown than known language. To test whether native (English) and non-native (Mandarin) speakers of English could learn to control the interference of a known language masker, we measured their ability to transcribe English sentences against the background of English or Mandarin competing talkers over the course of 50 trials. Both groups improved over time. Native listeners exhibited release from linguistic masking, with less masking in the Mandarin than English masker condition. The size of this effect increased over time. In contrast, non-native listeners showed no difference between the two language maskers, with this pattern unaffected by time. Masker-to-target intrusion errors decreased over time for native listeners, whereas they were virtually absent for the non-native listeners. The results show that (1) Linguistic masking is worst when the masker language is known to the listener, whether that language is native or non-native, (2) Whether the masker is the same language as the target language is comparatively less important for non-native listeners, and (3) Native listeners are better at learning to suppress masker interference over time than non-native listeners.