Patterns of English phoneme confusions by native and non-native listeners

Native American English and non-native (Dutch) listeners identified either the consonant or the vowel in all possible American English CV and VC syllables. The syllables were embedded in multispeaker babble at three signal-to-noise ratios (0, 8, and 16 dB). The phoneme identification performance of...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 2004-12, Vol.116 (6), p.3668-3678
Main Authors: CUTLER, Anne, WEBER, Andrea, SMITS, Roel, COOPER, Nicole
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Acoustics
Adolescent
Adult
Attention
Audition
Biological and medical sciences
Exact sciences and technology
Female
Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology
Fundamental areas of phenomenology (including applications)
Humans
Language
Male
Multilingualism
Noise - adverse effects
Perception
Phonetics
Physics
Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry
Psychology. Psychophysiology
Speech Acoustics
Speech Discrimination Tests
Speech Perception
Students - psychology
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Summary:Native American English and non-native (Dutch) listeners identified either the consonant or the vowel in all possible American English CV and VC syllables. The syllables were embedded in multispeaker babble at three signal-to-noise ratios (0, 8, and 16 dB). The phoneme identification performance of the non-native listeners was less accurate than that of the native listeners. All listeners were adversely affected by noise. With these isolated syllables, initial segments were harder to identify than final segments. Crucially, the effects of language background and noise did not interact; the performance asymmetry between the native and non-native groups was not significantly different across signal-to-noise ratios. It is concluded that the frequently reported disproportionate difficulty of non-native listening under disadvantageous conditions is not due to a disproportionate increase in phoneme misidentifications.
ISSN:0001-4966
1520-8524
DOI:10.1121/1.1810292