Perception of silent-center syllables by native and non-native English speakers

Abstract

The amount of acoustic information that native and non-native listeners need for syllable identification was investigated by comparing the performance of monolingual English speakers and native Spanish speakers with either an earlier or a later age of immersion in an English-speaking environment. Duration-preserved silent-center syllables retaining 10, 20, 30, or 40 ms of the consonant-vowel and vowel-consonant transitions were created for the target vowels /i, (, e(, , ae/ and /Ä/, spoken by two males in /bVb/ context. Duration-neutral syllables were created by editing the silent portion to equate the duration of all vowels. Listeners identified the syllables in a six-alternative forced-choice task. The earlier learners identified the whole-word and 40 ms duration-preserved syllables as accurately as the monolingual listeners, but identified the silent-center syllables significantly less accurately overall. Only the monolingual listener group identified syllables significantly more accurately in the duration-preserved than in the duration-neutral condition, suggesting that the non-native listeners were unable to recover from the syllable disruption sufficiently to access the duration cues in the silent-center syllables. This effect was most pronounced for the later learners, who also showed the most vowel confusions and the greatest decrease in performance from the whole word to the 40 ms transition condition.

Do nonnative listeners benefit as much as native listeners from spatial cues that release speech from masking?

“…Nonnative speakers of a language tend to have lower scores than native speakers on a number of speech-reception measures (Bradlow and Bent, 2002;Bradlow and Pisoni, 1999;Cooke et al, 2008;Mayo et al, 1997;Meador et al, 2000;Rogers et al, 2006;Rogers and Lopez, 2008;van Wijngaarden et al, 2002). This difference in performance is influenced by several factors, such as duration of exposure to the nonnative language, degree of similarity between the native and nonnative languages, knowledge of the nonnative language vocabulary and grammatical structure, frequency and extent of nonnative language use, etc.…”

Do age and linguistic background alter the audiovisual advantage when listening to speech in the presence of energetic and informational masking?

“…Young people listening to English as a second language (YEL2s) are not likely to differ substantially from young people listening to English as their first language (YEL1s) with respect to basic perceptual and cognitive abilities supporting speech perception. However, nonnative listeners (L2s) are found to have lower performance than native listeners (L1s) on a number of auditory-only speech-perception measures (Avivi-Reich, Daneman, & Schneider, 2014;Avivi-Reich, Jakubczyk, Daneman, & Schneider, 2015;Bradlow & Bent, 2002;Bradlow & Pisoni, 1999;Cooke, Garcia Lecumberri, & Barker, 2008;Ezzatian et al, 2010;Mayo, Florentine, & Buus, 1997;Meador, Flege., & Mackay, 2000;Rogers & Lopez, 2008). The differences found between native and nonnative listeners in auditory speech perception could be due, in part, to incomplete acquisition of the acoustic-phonetic characteristics of the second language (e.g., Florentine, 1985;Mayo et al, 1997).…”

Vowel identification by younger and older listeners: Relative effectiveness of vowel edges and vowel centers

“…They were selected from a larger set of stimuli previously recorded and digitized (44.1 kHz sampling rate, 16 bit A/D converter) by Rogers and Lopez (2008). For the present study, three exemplars from each of two male talkers were used.…”