Abstract
Non-native listeners deal with adverse listening conditions in their daily life much harder than native listeners. However, previous work in our laboratories found that native Chinese listeners with native English exposure may improve the use of temporal fluctuations of noise for English vowel identification. The purpose of this study was to investigate whether Chinese listeners can generalize the use of temporal cues for the English sentence recognition in noise. Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) sentence recognition in quiet condition, stationary noise, and temporally-modulated noise were measured for native American English listeners (EN), native Chinese listeners in the United States (CNU), and native Chinese listeners in China (CNC). Results showed that in general, EN listeners outperformed the two groups of CN listeners in quiet and noise, while CNU listeners had better scores of sentence recognition than CNC listeners. Moreover, the native English exposure helped CNU listeners use high-level linguistic cues more effectively and take more advantage of temporal fluctuations of noise to process English sentence in severely degraded listening conditions [i.e., the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of −12 dB] than CNC listeners. These results suggest a significant effect of language experience on the auditory processing of both speech and noise.
Highlights
In daily life, speech sounds are usually perceived in noisy and complex listening environments
In order to examine the effect of listener group on sentence recognition performance in quiet, a generalized linear model (GLM) was conducted with the scores in quiet as the dependent variable and listener group as a fixed effect
Pairwise comparisons demonstrated that the English listeners (EN) group performed significantly better than the two Chinese groups, while the Chinese listeners in the United States (CNU) group significantly outperformed the Chinese listeners in China (CNC) group
Summary
Speech sounds are usually perceived in noisy and complex listening environments. A number of studies have demonstrated that speech recognition in noise is much harder for non-native listeners than for native listeners regardless of stimuli are either vowels, consonants, words, or sentences (Mayo et al, 1997; Cooke et al, 2008; Cutler et al, 2008; Shi, 2010; Jin and Liu, 2012; Mi et al, 2013; Rimikis et al, 2013; Guan et al, 2015; Zinszer et al, 2019). In a follow-up study, Jin and Liu (2014) found no significant difference in English vowel identification in LTSSN and MTB, suggesting that L2 speech recognition in noises was dependent on L1 experience, the type of noise, and speech materials
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