Effects of Listener Age and Native Language Experience on Recognition of Accented and Unaccented English Words

Abstract

Purpose: Older native speakers of English have difficulty in understanding Spanish-accented English compared to younger native English speakers. However, it is unclear if this age effect would be observed among native speakers of Spanish. The current study investigates the effects of age and native language experience with Spanish on the ability to recognize words spoken in English by Spanishaccented and unaccented talkers. Method: English monosyllabic words, recorded by native speakers of English and Spanish, were presented to 4 groups of listeners with normal hearing: younger native Spanish listeners (n = 15), older native Spanish listeners (n = 16), younger native English listeners (n = 15), and older native English listeners (n = 15). Speech recognition accuracy was assessed for the unaccented and accented words in both quiet and noise. Results: In all conditions, the native English listeners performed better than the native Spanish listeners. More specifically, the native speakers of Spanish consistently recognized accented English less accurately than the native speakers of English, demonstrating no advantage of shared native language experience between nonnative listeners and accented talkers. Older listeners in the native Spanish language group also performed less accurately than their younger counterparts, for English words spoken by both unaccented and accented talkers. Finally, whereas listeners who were native speakers of English showed marked declines in recognition of Spanish-accented English relative to unaccented English, listeners who were native speakers of Spanish (both younger and older) showed less decline. Conclusions: The general pattern of results suggests that both native language experience in a language other than English and age limit the ability to recognize Spanishaccented English. The implication of the overall findings is that older nonnative listeners will have considerable difficulty in understanding English, regardless of the talker's accent, in both clinical and everyday listening situations.

Aging Impacts Speech-In-Noise Recognition Differently For Nonnative And Native Listeners

“…However, unlike in the present study, accuracy did not differ between younger and older native speakers. In light of these findings, the significant age effects for both tasks in the present study are particularly noteworthy because most participants in the present study are younger than the older participants in Gordon-Salant et al (2019) and thus in principle would be less likely to exhibit age effects. Desjardins et al (2019) compared performance on the Hearing in Noise Test (HINT; Nilsson et al, 1994) among 20-28 year-old English monolinguals and Spanish-English bilinguals to that of 49-67 yearolds with similar linguistic backgrounds.…”

“…Mixed results were found across the two studies. In both studies, older bilinguals performed numerically worse than older monolinguals but the interactions between age and listener group were significant in the study conducted by Gordon-Salant et al (2019) and not significant in the study conducted by Desjardins et al (2019).…”

“…The observed interaction of age and listener group among listeners spanning ages 18-65 is, to the best of our knowledge, a novel finding. The two studies to date which have analyzed interactive effects of aging and linguistic background on SiN understanding (Desjardins et al, 2019;Gordon-Salant et al, 2019) have found inconsistent patterns of age effects between monolingual and bilingual listener groups. However, in these prior studies, age was treated categorically (older vs. younger).…”

“…Grant et al, 2014 for a review) suggests that aging should compound SiN difficulties for bilinguals. Despite this, only two studies have analyzed interactions between listener age and linguistic background in predicting English SiN in adults (Desjardins et al, 2019;Gordon-Salant et al, 2019). In these studies, categorical groups of older (spanning ages 49-80) and younger (spanning ages 19-33) Spanish-English bilinguals with normal hearing thresholds were tested on word-and sentence-level stimuli produced by native English talkers, and compared to either Spanish test stimuli, or Spanish-accented English test stimuli, depending on the study.…”

Effects of listener age and native language on perception of accented and unaccented sentences

“…A previous study investigating monosyllabic word recognition by younger and older L1 and L2 normal-hearing listeners (Gordon-Salant et al, 2018) failed to find clear evidence of an ISIB effect. L1 listeners consistently showed higher word recognition scores for the accented talkers than did the L2 listeners.…”