Linguistic contributions to speech-on-speech masking for native and non-native listeners: Language familiarity and semantic content

Susanne Brouwer*, Kristin J. Van Engen, Lauren Calandruccio, Ann R. Bradlow

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

119 Scopus citations

Abstract

This study examined whether speech-on-speech masking is sensitive to variation in the degree of similarity between the target and the masker speech. Three experiments investigated whether speech-in-speech recognition varies across different background speech languages (English vs Dutch) for both English and Dutch targets, as well as across variation in the semantic content of the background speech (meaningful vs semantically anomalous sentences), and across variation in listener status vis - vis the target and masker languages (native, non-native, or unfamiliar). The results showed that the more similar the target speech is to the masker speech (e.g., same vs different language, same vs different levels of semantic content), the greater the interference on speech recognition accuracy. Moreover, the listener's knowledge of the target and the background language modulate the size of the release from masking. These factors had an especially strong effect on masking effectiveness in highly unfavorable listening conditions. Overall this research provided evidence that that the degree of target-masker similarity plays a significant role in speech-in-speech recognition. The results also give insight into how listeners assign their resources differently depending on whether they are listening to their first or second language.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)1449-1464
Number of pages16
Journaljournal of the Acoustical Society of America
Volume131
Issue number2
DOIs
StatePublished - Feb 2012

Funding

This work was supported by Grant No. R01-DC005794 from NIH-NIDCD, and the Hugh Knowles Center at Northwestern University. We would like to thank Sumitrajit Dhar for the use of his equipment and Chun Liang Chan for his technical support throughout this project. We also thank Andrew Sabin for help with the LTAS normalization procedure. Parts of this work were presented at the Acoustical Society of America 2009 (Portland) and 2010 conference (Cancun). 1

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Arts and Humanities (miscellaneous)
  • Acoustics and Ultrasonics

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