Monolingual Listeners Research Articles

Receptive vocabulary predicts multilinguals' recognition skills in adverse listening conditions.

Adverse listening conditions are known to affect bilingual listeners' intelligibility scores more than those of monolingual listeners. To advance theoretical understanding of the mechanisms underpinning bilinguals' challenges in adverse listening conditions, vocabulary size and language entropy are compared as predictors in a sentence transcription task with a heterogeneous multilingual population representative of a speech community. Adverse listening was induced through noise type, bandwidth manipulations, and sentences varying in their semantic predictability. Overall, the results generally confirm anticipated patterns with respect to sentence type, noise masking, and bandwidth. Listeners show better comprehension of semantically coherent utterances without masking and with a full spectrum. Crucially, listeners with larger receptive vocabularies and lower language entropy, a measure of the predictability of one's language use, showed improved performance in adverse listening conditions. Vocabulary size had a substantially larger effect size, indicating that vocabulary size has more impact on performance in adverse listening conditions than bilingual language use. These results suggest that the mechanism behind the bilingual disadvantage in adverse listening conditions may be rooted in bilinguals' smaller language-specific receptive vocabularies, offering a harmonious explanation for challenges in adverse listening conditions experienced by monolinguals and multilinguals.

The use of lexical semantics for processing face-masked speech in monolinguals and bilinguals.

Face masks impede visual and acoustic cues that help make speech processing and language comprehension more efficient. Many studies report this phenomenon, but few examined how listeners utilize semantic information to overcome the challenges posed by face masks. Fewer still investigated this impact on bilinguals' processing of face-masked speech [Smiljanic, Keerstock, Meemann, and Ransom, S. M. (2021). J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 149(6), 4013-4023; Truong, Beck, and Weber (2021). J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 149(1), 142-144]. Therefore, this study aims to determine how monolingual and bilingual listeners use semantic information to compensate for the loss of visual and acoustic information when the speaker is wearing a mask. A lexical priming experiment tested how monolingual listeners and early-acquiring simultaneous bilingual listeners responded to video of English word pairs. The prime-target pairs were either strongly related, weakly related, or unrelated and were both either masked or unmasked. Analyses of reaction time results showed an overall effect of masking in both groups and an effect of semantic association strength on processing masked and unmasked speech. However, speaker groups were not different; subsequent analyses of difference values showed no effect of semantic context. These results illustrate the limited role of word-level semantic information on processing in adverse listening conditions. Results are discussed in light of semantic processing at the sentence level.

Perceptual learning alters effects of foreign language backgrounds in speech-in-speech recognition.

The effect of training on linguistic release from masking (LRM) was examined. In a pre-test and post-test, English monolingual listeners transcribed sentences presented with English and Dutch maskers. During training, participants transcribed sentences with either Dutch, English, or white noise maskers and received feedback. LRM was evident in the pre-test (performance was better with Dutch maskers) but was eliminated after training (masker conditions did not differ). Thus, the informational masking driving LRM can be ameliorated through training. This study is a basis for future research examining the specific aspects of informational masking that change as a function of experience.

Listeners' Linguistic Experience Affects the Degree of Perceived Nativeness of First Language Pronunciation.

The aim of this study was to explore if and to what extent Austrian-English late sequential bilinguals who have been living in a second language (L2) environment for several decades are perceived to sound native in their first language (L1) when being compared to monolingual Austrian German (AG) control speakers. Furthermore, this investigation aimed to identify if listeners differ in their judgments of nativeness of L1 pronunciation depending on their own language background. For this purpose, two groups of native Austrian German listeners (N = 30 each), who differed regarding their linguistic background (Austrian German monolingual and Austrian German-English bilingual listeners) were asked to rate spontaneous speech samples produced by Austrian English bilingual and Austrian German monolingual speakers. Results showed that the bilingual L1 speech was perceived to sound overall less native compared to monolingual control speech. It was further observed that the two listener groups significantly differed in their perception of nativeness: Bilingual listeners were overall less likely to judge bilingual L1 pronunciation to sound non-native compared to monolingual listeners. To date, this is the first study to show that listener experience influences their perception of nativeness of L1 pronunciation and, thus, adds a new dimension to the notion of the native speaker.

A novel corpus developed to evaluate the impact of hospital noise on speech intelligibility

Hospital noise often exceeds recommended sound levels set by health organizations leading to reductions in speech intelligibility and communication breakdowns between doctors and patients. However, quantifying the impact of hospital noise on intelligibility has been limited by stimuli employed in prior studies, which did not include medically related terminology. To address this gap, a corpus of medically related sentences was developed. Word frequency, word familiarity, and sentence predictability, factors known to impact intelligibility of speech, were quantified. Nearly 700 words were selected from the Merriam-Webster Medical Dictionary. Word frequency was taken from Lexique, a 51-million-word corpus of American subtitles (Brysbaert & New, 2009). Word familiarity was rated by 41 monolingual listeners. The words were then used to construct 200 sentences. To determine sentence predictability, the sentences were presented to 48 participants with one word missing; their task was to fill in the missing word. Three 40 item sentence sets with different familiarity / frequency types (low/low, high/low, high/high) were selected, all with low predictability levels. These sentences and 40 standard speech perception sentences were recorded by two male and two female talkers. This corpus can be used to assess how hospital noise impacts intelligibility across listener populations. Brysbaert, M., & New, B. (2009). Moving beyond Kučera and Francis: A critical evaluation of current word frequency norms and the introduction of a new and improved word frequency measure for American English. Behavior Research Methods, 41, 977-990. doi:10.3758/BRM.41.4.977.

Behavioral Pattern Analysis between Bilingual and Monolingual Listeners’ Natural Speech Perception on Foreign-Accented English Language Using Different Machine Learning Approaches

Speech perception in an adverse background/noisy environment is a complex and challenging human process, which is made even more complicated in foreign-accented language for bilingual and monolingual individuals. Listeners who have difficulties in hearing are affected most by such a situation. Despite considerable efforts, the increase in speech intelligibility in noise remains elusive. Considering this opportunity, this study investigates Bengali–English bilinguals and native American English monolinguals’ behavioral patterns on foreign-accented English language considering bubble noise, gaussian or white noise, and quiet sound level. Twelve regular hearing participants (Six Bengali–English bilinguals and Six Native American English monolinguals) joined in this study. Statistical computation shows that speech with different noise has a significant effect (p = 0.009) on listening for both bilingual and monolingual under different sound levels (e.g., 55 dB, 65 dB, and 75 dB). Here, six different machine learning approaches (Logistic Regression (LR), Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA), K-nearest neighbors (KNN), Naïve Bayes (NB), Classification and regression trees (CART), and Support vector machine (SVM)) are tested and evaluated to differentiate between bilingual and monolingual individuals from their behavioral patterns in both noisy and quiet environments. Results show that most optimal performances were observed using LDA by successfully differentiating between bilingual and monolingual 60% of the time. A deep neural network-based model is proposed to improve this measure further and achieved an accuracy of nearly 100% in successfully differentiating between bilingual and monolingual individuals.

The effect of background noise on speech perception in monolingual and bilingual adults with normal hearing.

Background:Previous studies have highlighted that bilingual listeners have a deficit in speech perception in their second language compared with monolingual listeners in noisy listening environments. This deficit may give rise to educational and occupational implications for bilingual speakers who are studying or working in non-native language environments in poor acoustic conditions.Objectives:To compare the speech perception performance of monolingual English speakers and English as a second language (ESL) bilinguals within environments with various levels of background noise and to examine whether bilinguals with an early age of second language acquisition would perform better than those with a late age of acquisition.Study sample:Two groups of adult listeners with normal hearing participated: monolingual British English listeners (N = 15) and bilingual Arabic listeners for whom English was their second language and who were proficient in English (N = 15). The quick speech-in-noise (QuickSIN) test was used to assess signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) loss and SNR-50 for both groups.Results:The QuickSIN test results indicated that bilingual Arabic listeners with normal hearing displayed a mild SNR loss comparable to that observed for a person with hearing loss, indicating a higher SNR needed for this population to achieve a comparable level of comprehension to their monolingual English peers.Conclusion:Results highlight the importance of measuring SNR loss to obtain accurate diagnosis and potential rehabilitative information that is not available from audiogram studies.

Bilinguals' comprehension of foreign-accented speech

Foreign accents represent a common challenge to successful speech recognition, and while much has been uncovered about the factors contributing to the intelligibility of foreign-accented speech, most of it is based on data from monolingual listeners. There is good reason to believe, however, that bilinguals have a different experience when decoding foreign-accented speech: their two phonologies offer both greater flexibility in phonological-lexical mapping (Samuel and Larraza, 2015) but also greater lexical competition (Marian & Spivey, 2003). Further, they are known to perform more poorly than monolinguals in speech-in-noise comprehension (Rogers et al., 2006). Given these consequences of bilingualism, the current study compares the intelligibility of foreign-accented speech for monolingual listeners and simultaneous bilingual listeners. Spanish-English bilinguals and English monolinguals performed a sentence repetition task for sentences produced by speakers of Mandarin-Chinese accented English with varying levels of proficiency in English. The competing hypotheses for this study are as follows: (1) because bilinguals' have a more flexible phonological-lexical mapping system, they will outperform the monolinguals in foreign-accented speech recognition; or, (2) greater lexical competition due to the bilinguals' L2 lexicon will result in poorer performance. The results will provide insight on bilingual sentence processing, and shed light on the shared and unique experiences of bilinguals and monolinguals.

Phonemic restoration in monolingual and bilingual listeners in a sentence context

Phonemic restoration, the illusion in which listeners perceive a word as intact when a phoneme is replaced by non-speech noise, has been shown in both adults and children (Warren 1970; Newman 2004). Phonemic restoration appears to have a lexical basis (Samuel 1997); however, bilingual listeners may be limited in their ability to engage this top-down skill because their lexical knowledge is necessarily less robust in a given language than that of their monolingual peers. Bilingual phonemic restoration has rarely been shown, particularly in sentences, but exploring it allows us to better understand the top-down linguistic factors of the effect. In the present study, monolingual and bilingual English speakers listened to and transcribed 92 low-predictability sentences in four conditions: no noise, pink noise throughout, pink noise-filled gaps, and silent gaps. Here “bilingual” includes both crib bilinguals and English L2 speakers. Preliminary results suggest that monolingual listeners show the standard phonemic restoration effect such that transcription is more accurate for filled-gap than silent-gap sentences, but that bilingual listeners do not. For bilingual listeners only, English verbal fluency scores are positively correlated with transcription accuracy in all three degraded conditions (noise throughout, filled-gap, and silent gap), suggesting that language proficiency contributes to listeners' ability to comprehend speech in various types of noise.

Bilingual talker identification with spontaneous speech in Cantonese and English: The role of language-specific knowledge

Previous research has shown that implicit or explicit knowledge about a language lends itself to improved talker recognition performance. In the context of this language familiarity effect, it is apparent that bilinguals are better at generalizing voice learning across their known languages compared to monolingual listeners [Orena et al., JASA, 146 (2019)]. Other work suggests that training in an unknown language generalizes to a known language more robustly than the reverse [Winters et al., JASA 123 (2008)]. The current study launches from these previous studies. This project uses excerpted Cantonese and English snippets from spontaneous interview speech from Cantonese-English bilinguals in a talker identification training experiment with Cantonese-English bilingual listeners and bilingual listeners with no knowledge of Cantonese (or related languages). Listeners are assigned to either Cantonese or English training, and then all listeners are tested on both Cantonese and English utterances to assess learning for the trained language and generalization to the bilingual's second language. Results of a multilingual questionnaire quantify listeners' code-switching abilities and multilingual competence, which, given prior research, should account for some individual differences. Using spontaneous productions, as opposed to read speech, improves the ecological validity of this research and broadens its implications.

Differential Neurobehavioral Effects of Cross-Modal Selective Priming on Phonetic and Emotional Prosodic Information in Late Second Language Learners.

Purpose Spoken language is inherently multimodal and multidimensional in natural settings, but very little is known about how second language (L2) learners undertake multilayered speech signals with both phonetic and affective cues. This study investigated how late L2 learners undertake parallel processing of linguistic and affective information in the speech signal at behavioral and neurophysiological levels. Method Behavioral and event-related potential measures were taken in a selective cross-modal priming paradigm to examine how late L2 learners (N = 24, M age = 25.54 years) assessed the congruency of phonetic (target vowel: /a/ or /i/) and emotional (target affect: happy or angry) information between the visual primes of facial pictures and the auditory targets of spoken syllables. Results Behavioral accuracy data showed a significant congruency effect in affective (but not phonetic) priming. Unlike a previous report on monolingual first language (L1) users, the L2 users showed no facilitation in reaction time for congruency detection in either selective priming task. The neurophysiological results revealed a robust N400 response that was stronger in the phonetic condition but without clear lateralization and that the N400 effect was weaker in late L2 listeners than in monolingual L1 listeners. Following the N400, late L2 learners showed a weaker late positive response than the monolingual L1 users, particularly in the left central to posterior electrode regions. Conclusions The results demonstrate distinct patterns of behavioral and neural processing of phonetic and affective information in L2 speech with reduced neural representations in both the N400 and the later processing stage, and they provide an impetus for further research on similarities and differences in L1 and L2 multisensory speech perception in bilingualism.

Auditory Sentence Processing in Bilinguals: The Role of Cognitive Control.

A number of research studies have shown that the unique need in bilinguals to manage both of their languages positively impacts their cognitive control processes. Yet, due to a dearth of studies at the sentence level, it is still unclear if this benefit extends to sentence processing. In monolinguals and bilinguals, cognitive control helps in reinterpretation of garden path sentences but it is still unknown how it supports the real-time resolution of interference during parsing, such as the type of interference seen in the processing of object relative (OR) sentences. In this study, we compared monolinguals and bilinguals during online spoken OR sentence processing and examined if both groups used cognitive control to resolve interference. In this eye-tracking visual world (ETL-vw) study, OR sentences were aurally presented to 19 monolingual and 21 Spanish-English bilingual adults while gaze patterns were captured throughout the time course of the sentence. Of particular interest was the post-verb position, where the listener connects the verb to its direct object. In OR constructions (e.g., “The man that the boy pushes__ has a red shirt.”), the verb (‘pushes’) links to its syntactically licensed direct object (‘the man’) at verb offset. During syntactic linking, the parser crosses over an intervening noun phrase (NP, ‘the boy’) and the two NP activations create interference. The nature of this paradigm allows us to measure interference and its resolution between the intervening NP and the displaced object in real-time. By relating sentence processing patterns with cognitive control measures, high- and no- conflict N-Back tasks, we investigated group differences in the use of cognitive control during sentence processing. Overall, bilinguals showed less interference than monolinguals from the intervening NP during the real time processing of OR sentences. This interference effect and its resolution was significantly predicted by cognitive control skills for bilingual, but not monolingual listeners. This enhanced effect in bilinguals extends previous findings of interference resolution to real time spoken sentence processing suggesting that bilinguals are more efficient than monolinguals at managing interference during complex sentence processing.

Intelligibility of Children With Speech Sound Disorders Evaluated by Listeners With Swedish as a Second Language.

Purpose This study aimed to investigate the intelligibility of children's atypical speech in relation to listeners' language background. Method Forty-eight participants listened to and transcribed isolated words repeated by children with speech sound disorders. Participants were divided into, on the one hand, a multilingual group (n = 29) that was further divided into subgroups based on age of acquisition (early, 0-3 years; intermediate, 4-12 years; and late, > 12 years) and, on the other hand, a monolingual comparison group (n = 19). Results The monolingual listeners obtained higher intelligibility scores than the multilingual listeners; this difference was statistically significant. Participants who acquired Swedish at an older age (> 4 years) were found to have lower scores than other listeners. The later the age of acquisition, the less of the atypical speech was decoded correctly. A further analysis of the transcriptions also revealed a higher level of nonwords among the incorrect transcriptions of the multilinguals than that of the monolinguals who used more real words, whereas both groups were equally prone to using blanks when they did not perceive a word. Conclusions This indicates a higher risk of communicative problems between late acquirers of Swedish and children with speech sound disorders. Clinical implications, such as involving communication partners in the intervention process, are discussed as well as possible linguistic explanations to the findings. This study could be seen as a starting point in the field of research regarding the relations between the language background of the listener and the ability to perceive atypical speech.

Bilingualism leads to greater auditory capacity

The objective of this article is to investigate the effects of bilingualism on auditory capacity of young adults using a dichotic consonant–vowel (CV) test. Listeners were asked to identify distinct CVs dichotically presented to each ear through headphones. CV identification accuracy in both ears served as a measure of auditory capacity of listeners. Eighty normal hearing participants including 40 bilinguals (23 males and 17 females) and 40 monolinguals (11 males and 29 females) were used as study sample. Members of the bilingual group acquired their second language before entering elementary school. The bilingual listeners had higher mean both-ear-correct scores than did monolingual listeners, indicating a greater auditory capacity in the bilingual group than in the monolingual group. The finding of greater auditory capacity in bilinguals using a task requiring divided attention reflects greater ability to store and recall auditory information in bilinguals. However, the inconsistency of results across studies of bilingual advantages indicates that there is a need for further research in this area using both linguistic and non-linguistic tasks and considering age of acquisition as a possible moderating variable.

Perception of American-English Vowels by Early and Late Spanish-English Bilinguals.

Increasing numbers of Hispanic immigrants are entering the US and learning American-English (AE) as a second language (L2). Previous studies investigating the relationship between AE and Spanish vowels have revealed an advantage for early L2 learners for their accuracy of L2 vowel perception. Replicating and extending such previous research, this study examined the patterns with which early and late Spanish-English bilingual adults assimilated naturally-produced AE vowels to their native vowel inventory and the accuracy with which they discriminated the vowels. Twelve early Spanish-English bilingual, 12 late Spanish-English bilingual, and 10 monolingual listeners performed perceptual-assimilation and categorical-discrimination tasks involving AE /i,ɪ,ɛ,ʌ,æ,ɑ,o/. Early bilinguals demonstrated similar assimilation patterns to late bilinguals. Late bilinguals' discrimination was less accurate than early bilinguals' and AE monolinguals'. Certain contrasts, such as /æ-ɑ/, /ʌ-ɑ/, and /ʌ-æ/, were particularly difficult to discriminate for both bilingual groups. Consistent with previous research, findings suggest that early L2 learning heightens Spanish-English bilinguals' ability to perceive cross-language phonetic differences. However, even early bilinguals' native-vowel system continues to influence their L2 perception.

Perception of intelligibility and qualities of non-native accented speakers

PurposeTo provide effective treatment to clients, speech-language pathologists must be understood, and be perceived to demonstrate the personal qualities necessary for therapeutic practice (e.g., resourcefulness and empathy). One factor that could interfere with the listener’s perception of non-native speech is the speaker’s accent. The current study explored the relationship between how accurately listeners could understand non-native speech and their perceptions of personal attributes of the speaker. Additionally, this study investigated how listeners’ familiarity and experience with other languages may influence their perceptions of non-native accented speech. MethodsThrough an online survey, native monolingual and bilingual English listeners rated four non-native accents (i.e., Spanish, Chinese, Russian, and Indian) on perceived intelligibility and perceived personal qualities (i.e., professionalism, intelligence, resourcefulness, empathy, and patience) necessary for speech-language pathologists. ResultsThe results indicated significant relationships between the perception of intelligibility and the perception of personal qualities (i.e., professionalism, intelligence, and resourcefulness) attributed to non-native speakers. However, these findings were not supported for the Chinese accent. Bilingual listeners judged the non-native speech as more intelligible in comparison to monolingual listeners. No significant differences were found in the ratings between bilingual listeners who share the same language background as the speaker and other bilingual listeners. ConclusionsBased on the current findings, greater perception of intelligibility was the key to promoting a positive perception of personal qualities such as professionalism, intelligence, and resourcefulness, important for speech-language pathologists. The current study found evidence to support the claim that bilinguals have a greater ability in understanding non-native accented speech compared to monolingual listeners. The results, however, did not confirm an advantage for bilingual listeners sharing the same language backgrounds with the non-native speaker over other bilingual listeners.

Exploring the Bilingual Phonological Space: Early Bilinguals' Discrimination of Coronal Stop Contrasts.

It is well known that the way monolingual listeners discriminate speech sounds is strongly influenced by their native (L1) sound system. Moreover, such perceptual constraints are not limited to monolinguals: multiple studies have found evidence of language-specificity in bilingual speech perception. However, the question of whether bilinguals have simultaneous access to both of their phonologies during non-native contrast discrimination has not been systematically examined. Namely, very few studies of bilinguals have specifically examined cases where a non-native contrast pair straddles the boundary between two sound systems, with one sound corresponding to a sound in the L1, and the other to a sound in the second language (L2), but with neither the L1 nor the L2 containing both. The current study aimed to do so by comparing the ability of early bilinguals to discriminate non-native phonetic contrasts consisting of sounds that exist in either their L1 or L2, but not in both. A forced-choice perception task compared two listener groups-Spanish-English bilinguals and English monolinguals-on their perception of Nepali dental-alveolar stop contrasts. Results showed that despite displaying some sensitivity to phonetic differences within each contrast pair, the bilingual group was unable to discriminate such "cross-language contrasts" significantly better than the monolingual English control group.

Phoneme Error Pattern by Heritage Speakers of Spanish on an English Word Recognition Test

Heritage speakers acquire their native language from home use in their early childhood. As the native language is typically a minority language in the society, these individuals receive their formal education in the majority language and eventually develop greater competency with the majority than their native language. To date, there have not been specific research attempts to understand word recognition by heritage speakers. It is not clear if and to what degree we may infer from evidence based on bilingual listeners in general. This preliminary study investigated how heritage speakers of Spanish perform on an English word recognition test and analyzed their phoneme errors. A prospective, cross-sectional, observational design was employed. Twelve normal-hearing adult Spanish heritage speakers (four men, eight women, 20-38 yr old) participated in the study. Their language background was obtained through the Language Experience and Proficiency Questionnaire. Nine English monolingual listeners (three men, six women, 20-41 yr old) were also included for comparison purposes. Listeners were presented with 200 Northwestern University Auditory Test No. 6 words in quiet. They repeated each word orally and in writing. Their responses were scored by word, word-initial consonant, vowel, and word-final consonant. Performance was compared between groups with Student's t test or analysis of variance. Group-specific error patterns were primarily descriptive, but intergroup comparisons were made using 95% or 99% confidence intervals for proportional data. The two groups of listeners yielded comparable scores when their responses were examined by word, vowel, and final consonant. However, heritage speakers of Spanish misidentified significantly more word-initial consonants and had significantly more difficulty with initial /p, b, h/ than their monolingual peers. The two groups yielded similar patterns for vowel and word-final consonants, but heritage speakers made significantly fewer errors with /e/ and more errors with word-final /p, k/. Data reported in the present study lead to a twofold conclusion. On the one hand, normal-hearing heritage speakers of Spanish may misidentify English phonemes in patterns different from those of English monolingual listeners. Not all phoneme errors can be readily understood by comparing Spanish and English phonology, suggesting that Spanish heritage speakers differ in performance from other Spanish-English bilingual listeners. On the other hand, the absolute number of errors and the error pattern of most phonemes were comparable between English monolingual listeners and Spanish heritage speakers, suggesting that audiologists may assess word recognition in quiet in the same way for these two groups of listeners, if diagnosis is based on words, not phonemes.

Perception of American English vowels by sequential Spanish-English bilinguals.

Research on American-English (AE) vowel perception by Spanish-English bilinguals has focused on the vowels /i/-/ɪ/ (e.g., in sheep/ship). Other AE vowel contrasts may present perceptual challenges for this population, especially those requiring both spectral and durational discrimination. We used Event-Related Potentials (ERPs), MMN (Mismatch Negativity) and P300, to index discrimination of AE vowels /ɑ/-/ʌ/ by sequential adult Spanish-English bilingual listeners compared to AE monolinguals. Listening tasks were non-attended and attended, and vowels were presented with natural and neutralized durations. Regardless of vowel duration, bilingual listeners showed no MMN to unattended sounds, and P300 responses were elicited to /ɑ/ but not /ʌ/ in the attended condition. Monolingual listeners showed pre-attentive discrimination (MMN) for /ɑ/ only; while both vowels elicited P300 responses when attended. Findings suggest that Spanish-English bilinguals recruit attentional and cognitive resources enabling native-like use of both spectral and durational cues to discriminate between AE vowels /ɑ/ and /ʌ/.

Relative Weighting of Semantic and Syntactic Cues in Native and Non-Native Listeners' Recognition of English Sentences.

Non-native listeners do not recognize English sentences as effectively as native listeners, especially in noise. It is not entirely clear to what extent such group differences arise from differences in relative weight of semantic versus syntactic cues. This study quantified the use and weighting of these contextual cues via Boothroyd and Nittrouer's j and k factors. The j represents the probability of recognizing sentences with or without context, whereas the k represents the degree to which context improves recognition performance. Four groups of 13 normal-hearing young adult listeners participated. One group consisted of native English monolingual (EMN) listeners, whereas the other three consisted of non-native listeners contrasting in their language dominance and first language: English-dominant Russian-English, Russian-dominant Russian-English, and Spanish-dominant Spanish-English bilinguals. All listeners were presented three sets of four-word sentences: high-predictability sentences included both semantic and syntactic cues, low-predictability sentences included syntactic cues only, and zero-predictability sentences included neither semantic nor syntactic cues. Sentences were presented at 65 dB SPL binaurally in the presence of speech-spectrum noise at +3 dB SNR. Listeners orally repeated each sentence and recognition was calculated for individual words as well as the sentence as a whole. Comparable j values across groups for high-predictability, low-predictability, and zero-predictability sentences suggested that all listeners, native and non-native, utilized contextual cues to recognize English sentences. Analysis of the k factor indicated that non-native listeners took advantage of syntax as effectively as EMN listeners. However, only English-dominant bilinguals utilized semantics to the same extent as EMN listeners; semantics did not provide a significant benefit for the two non-English-dominant groups. When combined, semantics and syntax benefitted EMN listeners significantly more than all three non-native groups of listeners. Language background influenced the use and weighting of semantic and syntactic cues in a complex manner. A native language advantage existed in the effective use of both cues combined. A language-dominance effect was seen in the use of semantics. No first-language effect was present for the use of either or both cues. For all non-native listeners, syntax contributed significantly more to sentence recognition than semantics, possibly due to the fact that semantics develops more gradually than syntax in second-language acquisition. The present study provides evidence that Boothroyd and Nittrouer's j and k factors can be successfully used to quantify the effectiveness of contextual cue use in clinically relevant, linguistically diverse populations.