Speech‐in‐speech recognition: Phonetic distance and semantic content.

Abstract

Previous research has shown that monolingual English listeners receive a release from informational masking if the competing speech is foreign‐language versus native‐language noise [e.g., Van Engen & Bradlow (2007)]. This study examines whether speech‐in‐speech recognition varies even across typologically close target and noise languages (English versus Dutch) as well as across variation in the semantic content of the masker (meaningful versus semantically anomalous sentences) and the listener status (native versus nonnative listeners). The English and Dutch listeners’ task was to repeat target sentences in noise. The results for the Dutch listeners on Dutch targets showed a release from masking in English versus Dutch noise and in semantically anomalous versus meaningful sentences. Unexpectedly, the results for both listener groups on English targets only showed a release from masking for English anomalous noise relative to all other conditions. However, after normalization of the long term average spectrum of all noise, the results with English targets also showed a release from masking in foreign‐language noise and in semantically anomalous sentences. Taken together, these speech‐in‐speech recognition studies show that linguistic masking involves interference at the acoustic‐phonetic and the semantic levels. Moreover, the listener’s native or nonnative status influences the size of the release from masking.