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Across-talker effects on non-native listeners' vowel perception in noise
Tessa Bent1, Diane Kewley-Port, Sarah Hargus Ferguson
1Department of Speech and Hearing Sciences, Indiana University, 200 South Jordan Avenue, Bloomington, Indiana 47405, USA. tbent@indiana.edu
The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America
|November 30, 2010
Summary
Non-native listeners struggle with vowel perception due to across-talker variability. Differences in how native speakers produce vowels significantly impact non-native listeners
Area of Science:
- Speech and Language Acoustics
- Phonetics and Phonology
- Second Language Acquisition
Background:
- Across-talker variability in speech production poses challenges for non-native listeners.
- Native language phonological systems influence the perception of foreign language sounds.
- Understanding how listeners adapt to speaker variability is crucial for speech perception research.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the impact of across-talker variability on non-native vowel perception.
- To compare the vowel identification accuracy of American English (AE) and Korean listeners.
- To analyze the acoustic characteristics of vowels that contribute to perception difficulties.
Main Methods:
- Ten American English (AE) vowels in /bVd/ context were recorded by 10 AE talkers.
- Stimuli were presented to AE and Korean listeners in noise at three signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs).
- Listeners performed a 10-alternative forced-choice identification task; acoustic analysis was conducted on specific vowel pairs.
Main Results:
- AE listeners achieved 22% higher accuracy than Korean listeners in vowel identification.
- Significant variation in identification accuracy across talkers was observed for both listener groups.
- Korean listeners' errors on specific vowels were strongly linked to within-normal-range AE production variability.
Conclusions:
- Across-talker variability in native vowel production significantly influences non-native listeners' perception.
- Difficulties in forming native-like vowel categories may explain the heightened sensitivity to speaker variability.
- Findings highlight the importance of considering speaker variability in second language phonological acquisition research.
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