Impact of talker variability on word recognition in non-native listeners

This study investigates the perception of English words produced by 45 native talkers presented in moderate noise to native Norwegian listeners. The relative intelligibility of individual talkers is compared with that obtained for native listeners in order to determine whether intrinsic talker clarity is determined by global acoustic-phonetic characteristics. Talker intelligibility was strongly correlated across native and non-native listeners although the acoustic-phonetic characteristics that correlated with intelligibility varied across the two groups. For both groups, intelligibility was correlated with an amount of energy in the mid-frequency region, but whereas mean word duration was another relevant factor for the natives it was the F2 range in the vowel space for the non-natives. There was also a strong correlation across groups as to the lexical items most often misperceived. Results for two different listening conditions (recognition of isolated words vs triplets) suggested that non-native performance was to a certain extent hampered by increased cognitive load in the triplet condition.