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Reverberation affects perceptual performance, especially non-native listeners, elderly people, and people with hearing impairments. Native Japanese speakers confused some Japanese consonants and they failed to distinguish Japanese length contrast in reverberation [Arai et al., Proc. Autumn Meet. Acoust. Soc. Jpn., 2016]. The current study examined degradation degree of non-native speakers (native English speakers) in Japanese speech recognition in reverberation, using the same experiment settings with the previous study. There were two sets of stimulus: 1) Japanese consonant-vowel (CV) syllables, 2) non-words varying in duration of a certain vowel/consonant along durational continuum. In the results, although non-native speakers confused consonants even in non-reverberant condition, the number of their confusion in reverberation was larger than that in non-reverberant condition. Confusion of non-native speakers in reverberation was much more than that of native speakers. In addition, the results indicated that non-native speakers could hardly distinguish the length contrast of Japanese in reverberation. The proportion of “long” responses did not change sharply in the perception of vowel continuum, while native speakers changed their responses at some points on the continuum. The results suggest that learners need training for listening to speech sounds in reverberation.

Long reverberation degrades the intelligibility of speech sounds. Previous studies have reported that non-native listeners have difficulty in understanding speech in reverberation more than native listeners. In the results of the previous studies, there was the possibility that lower identification scores for non-native listeners were attributed to non-native phonemes which did not exist in their native languages. The current study investigated the identification of Japanese consonant-vowel (CV) syllables in reverberation for native English listeners whose native language has counterparts to most or all Japanese consonants. The current study used 62 CV syllables as stimuli. The reverberation time of the reverberant condition was 2.7 s. The results showed that the correct answer rate for non-native listeners declined in the reverberant condition more than that for native listeners. There was significant difference between native and non-native listeners in the correct answer rate of /m, r, k, d, s/ in reverberation. The results suggested that non-native listeners had disadvantage in listening to nonnative consonants even if their native languages had counterparts to the consonants. In addition, the results suggested that native English listeners might had advantage in finding acoustic cues of place of articulation in adverse environments because of the inventory of English.Ã The current paper includes the results for native listeners in Arai [1,2]. The parts of the results for non-native listeners in the current paper were preliminarily published [3]. y

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The perception of segmental duration is crucial for the distinction of Japanese length contrasts. However, the perceived duration may be changed in a long reverberation, which adds a ''tail'' to sounds, making them perceived as being longer. In addition, since lengthened sounds overlap the following sounds, the boundaries of phonemes would become blurred. In the current study, we investigated whether the effects of reverberation distort the distinction of Japanese length contrasts for native Japanese and English listeners. Stimuli were nonword pairs (