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Related Experiment Video

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Foreign Accent and Forensic Speaker Identification in Voice Lineups: The Influence of Acoustic Features Based on Prosody

Foreign Accent and Forensic Speaker Identification in Voice Lineups: The Influence of Acoustic Features Based on Prosody

Published on: September 27, 2024

Sentence recognition in native- and foreign-language multi-talker background noise.

Kristin J Van Engen¹, Ann R Bradlow

¹Department of Linguistics, Northwestern University, 2016 Sheridan Road, Evanston, Illinois 60208, USA. k-van@northwestern.edu

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

|February 15, 2007

Summary

Speech perception is impaired by linguistic interference from background talkers. This study found that listening to a different language in background babble causes less interference than listening to the same language.

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Area of Science:

Auditory perception
Psychoacoustics
Linguistics

Background:

Speech perception in noise is affected by linguistic content.
Previous studies rarely used background babble in languages different from the target speech.

Purpose of the Study:

To determine if background speech's adverse effect is due to linguistic content or acoustic characteristics.
To assess speech-in-noise recognition with background noise in the same or different language as the target speech.

Main Methods:

Assessed speech-in-noise recognition in native English listeners.
Used two-talker and six-talker babble in English and Mandarin Chinese.
Compared recognition performance across different babble conditions.

Main Results:

Poorer English sentence recognition in six-talker babble than two-talker babble, irrespective of babble language.
Greater adverse effect on English listeners in English babble compared to Mandarin Chinese babble (two-talker condition).
Demonstrated "linguistic interference" in sentence-in-noise recognition.

Conclusions:

Background speech language significantly impacts speech-in-noise recognition.
Linguistic interference, not just acoustic masking, affects auditory perception.
Further research is needed to understand the levels of linguistic structure involved and phonetic similarity effects.