Recognition of spoken words by native and non-native listeners: Talker-, listener-, and item-related factors

Abstract

In order to gain insight into the interplay between the talker-, listener-, and item-related factors that influence speech perception, a large multi-talker database of digitally recorded spoken words was developed, and was then submitted to intelligibility tests with multiple listeners. Ten talkers produced two lists of words at three speaking rates. One list contained lexically "easy" words (words with few phonetically similar sounding "neighbors" with which they could be confused), and the other list contained lexically "hard" (wordswords with many phonetically similar sounding "neighbors"). An analysis of the intelligibility data obtained with native speakers of English (experiment 1) showed a strong effect of lexical similarity. Easy words had higher intelligibility scores than hard words. A strong effect of speaking rate was also found whereby slow and medium rate words had higher intelligibility scores than fast rate words. Finally, a relationship was also observed between the various stimulus factors whereby the perceptual difficulties imposed by one factor, such as a hard word spoken at a fast rate, could be overcome by the advantage gained through the listener's experience and familiarity with the speech of a particular talker. In experiment 2, the investigation was extended to another listener population, namely, non-native listeners. Results showed that the ability to take advantage of surface phonetic information, such as a consistent talker across items, is a perceptual skill that transfers easily from first to second language perception. However, non-native listeners had particular difficulty with lexically hard words even when familiarity with the items was controlled, suggesting that nonnative word recognition may be compromised when fine phonetic discrimination at the segmental level is required. Taken together, the results of this study provide insight into the signal-dependent and signal-independent factors that influence spoken language processing in native and non-native listeners.

Sensitivity to Phonological Similarity Within and Across Languages

“…Therefore, during bilingual processing, cross-linguistic competitors with high-density neighborhoods may be less likely to become co-activated than cross-linguistic competitors with low-density neighborhoods. Furthermore, studies of auditory word recognition have suggested that non-native speakers experience particular difficulty recognizing words with high-density neighborhoods (Bradlow and Pisoni 1999;Takayanagi et al 2002). This difficulty may explain absence of high-density competitor activation in the non-native group.…”

“…Evidence from other within-language recognition studies suggests that large neighborhood size yields increased competition and delayed selection of the target word. In contrast, small neighborhood size yields reduced competition and speeds up recognition of the target word (e.g., Bradlow and Pisoni 1999;Garlock et al 2001;Luce and Pisoni 1998;Vitevitch and Luce 1998;Ziegler et al 2003). Therefore, during auditory word recognition, low-density words are activated more readily than high-density words.…”

“…In the bilingual literature, the few studies that examined the role of phonological neighborhood density in auditory language processing showed that the magnitude of the neighborhood density effect differed across native and non-native languages. For example, Bradlow and Pisoni (1999) found that both native and non-native listeners identified 'easy' words with sparse neighborhoods more accurately than 'hard' words with dense neighborhoods. However, the difference between easy and hard words was larger for non-native listeners than for native listeners (also see Takayanagi et al 2002), suggesting that bilinguals may be particularly likely to activate low-density words in a non-native language.…”

The Early Phase of /ɹ/ Production Development in Adult Japanese Learners of English

“…However, such studies need to be carefully designed in terms of the selection of tokens and listeners. Although native speakers are attuned to the acoustic properties of English /ɹ/ (e.g., F3, F2, F1, transition duration), their sound and word recognition patterns are also subject to the influence of lexical factors, such as text frequency and neighbourhood density (Bradlow & Pisoni, 1999) and familiarity with accented speech (Kennedy & Trofimovich, 2008). Furthermore, it might be relatively difficult for human listeners to accurately evaluate the quality of particular L2 sounds and words embedded in spontaneous speech samples because their judgments would likely be affected by not only phonological but also lexical, morphosyntactic, and pragmatic use of language (Piske et al, 2001).…”

Accent rating by native and non-native listeners

“…Further studies [16,17] have shown that there is also a role for listener-specific factors in perception of foreign-accentedness. Specifically, the role of native versus non-native status of the listener in the perception of talker accentedness has been the focus of a number of studies e.g, [18,19,20].…”