Sentence Accent Perception in Noise by French Non-Native Listeners of English

Abstract

This paper investigates the use of prosodic information signalling sentence accent and the role of different acoustic features on sentence accent perception during native and nonnative speech perception in the presence of background noise. A phoneme detection experiment was carried out in which English native listeners and French highly proficient non-native listeners of English were presented with target phonemes in English sentences. Sentences were presented in different levels of speech-shaped noise and in two prosodic contexts in which the target-bearing word was either deaccented or accented. Acoustic analyses of the two prosodic conditions showed that the target-bearing words in the accented condition carried more energy, had a higher F0, and more spectral tilt than those in the deaccented condition. Results of the behavioural data showed that the native listeners outperformed the French listeners in the clean condition but not in the noise conditions and that the effect of noise was smaller for the non-native compared to the native listeners. Possibly, the non-native listeners use more and different acoustic cues than the native listeners who primarily relied on more local cues for sentence accent detection.

Why listening in background noise is harder in a non-native language than in a native language: A review

“…This hypothesis is consistent with ERP findings of slower semantic integration in nonnative than in native listening (FitzPatrick & Indefrey, 2010). Moreover, non-native listeners have been found to have more difficulty exploiting prosodic cues in the presence of background noise than native listeners (Scharenborg et al, 2016b(Scharenborg et al, , 2018b. This impaired uptake and exploitation of prosodic cues might reduce the efficiency of the spoken-word recognition process, resulting in, e.g., less fast and deep processing of focussed syllables, which might have consequences for the activation of related words.…”

“…Different languages however have different instantiations of sentence accent due to differences in syntactic structure of the language (Kahnemuyipour, 2009), which causes difficulty for listeners to exploit prosodic cues in a non-native language. Nevertheless, non-native listeners, at least those with a high proficiency in the non-native language, have been shown to be able to detect sentence prominence (Rosenberg, Hirschberg, & Manis, 2010;Scharenborg, Kolkman, Kakouros, & Post, 2016b;Scharenborg, Kakouros, Meunier, & Post, 2018b;Wagner, 2005) and to use acoustic, prosodic cues for prominence detection that are similar to those used by native listeners (Akker & Cutler, 1997;Wagner, 2005). Nevertheless, non-native listeners are slower to detect sentence accent (Scharenborg et al, 2016b), and display a reduced efficiency in using prosodic information signalling sentence accent to build semantic frameworks, i.e., they are less able to integrate these information sources for spoken-word recognition (Akker & Cutler, 1997).…”

“…In native listening, semantic and prosodic information optimise the search for the optimal word by restricting the search space, and they guide the search for the semantically most important part of the message of the speaker (Akker & Cutler, 2003). As reviewed above, native listeners are able to use this higher-level semantic (e.g., Bradlow & Alexander, 2007) and prosodic (Scharenborg et al, 2016b(Scharenborg et al, , 2018b and lower-level acoustic information (e.g., Garcia…”