Abstract
Daily speech communication often takes place in suboptimal listening conditions, in which interlocutors typically need to segregate the target signal from the background sounds. The present study investigated the influence on speech recognition of a relatively familiar foreign accent in background speech (Exp. 1) and whether short-term immediate exposure to the target talker’s voice (Exp. 2) or the background babble (Exp. 3) would either help or hinder the segregation of target from background. A total of 72 native Dutch participants were asked to listen to Dutch target sentences in the presence of Dutch or German-accented Dutch babble without (Exp. 1) or with (Exps. 2 and 3) an exposure phase. Their task was to write down what they heard. The results of Experiment 1 revealed that listeners gained a release from masking when the background speech was accented, indicating that dissimilar and less familiar signals are easier to segregate effectively. Experiment 2 demonstrated that short-term immediate exposure to the target talker had no effect on speech-in-speech recognition, whereas exposure to the background babble could hinder separating the target voice from the background speech (Exp. 3). However, this reduced release from masking only appeared in the more difficult and more familiar babble condition (Dutch in Dutch), in which the speech recognition system may have remained attuned to the babble as a potential source of communicatively relevant information. Overall, this research provides evidence that both short-term adaptation and the degrees of target–background similarity and familiarity are of importance for speech-in-speech recognition.
Highlights
Speech communication often takes place in suboptimal listening conditions, in which interlocutors typically need to segregate the target signal from the background sounds
The present study aimed to test the limits of this hypothesis by examining the influences of a standard dialect of a language (i.e., Dutch) and of the same language spoken with a foreign accent (i.e., German-accented Dutch) on speech recognition
The present study focused on the effects on speech-in-speech recognition of exposure to both the target talker’s voice and the background babble
Summary
Speech communication often takes place in suboptimal listening conditions, in which interlocutors typically need to segregate the target signal from the background sounds. The present study investigated the influence on speech recognition of a relatively familiar foreign accent in background speech (Exp. 1) and whether short-term immediate exposure to the target talker’s voice (Exp. 2) or the background babble (Exp. 3) would either help or hinder the segregation of target from background. Experiment 2 demonstrated that short-term immediate exposure to the target talker had no effect on speech-in-speech recognition, whereas exposure to the background babble could hinder separating the target voice from the background speech (Exp. 3) This reduced release from masking only appeared in the more difficult and more familiar babble condition (Dutch in Dutch), in which the speech recognition system may have remained attuned to the babble as a potential source of communicatively relevant information. That work has provided accumulating evidence that a target–background language match influences speech-in-speech recognition negatively (i.e., the target– masker linguistic similarity hypothesis; Brouwer, Van Engen, Calandruccio, & Bradlow, 2012). Besides such deviations from the native phonemes, the syllable structure and prosodic patterns may be affected by foreign-accented speech
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