Speech perception for native and non-native English speakers: Effects of contextual cues

Abstract

Previous studies have shown that native English speakers outperformed non-native English speakers in perceiving English speech under quiet and noisy listening conditions. The purpose of this study is to investigate the difference between native English speakers and native Chinese speakers on using contextual cues to perceive speech in quiet and multi-talker babble. Three types of sentences served as the speech stimuli in this study: sentences with high predictability (including both semantic cues and syntactic cues), sentences with low predictability (including syntactic cues), and sentences with zero predictability (consisting random sequences of words). These sentences were presented to native-English and native-Chinese listeners in quiet and four-talker babble with the signal-to-noise ratio at 0 and -5 dB. Preliminary results suggested that native Chinese speakers primarily rely on semantic information when perceiving speech in quiet, whereas native English speakers showed greater reliance on syntactic cues when perceiving speech in noisy situations. The difference between native English speaker and native Chinese speakers on syntactic, and semantic information utilization in various listening conditions will be discussed. [Work supported by The University of Texas at Austin, Undergraduate Research Fellowship and China National Natural Science Foundation 31628009]