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Related Experiment Video

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A Method to Study Adaptation to Left-Right Reversed Audition

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Change detection is biased to listeners' known languages in complex auditory scenes.

Anna Y Liu¹, Christina M Vanden Bosch der Nederlanden¹

¹Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, University of Toronto Mississauga.

Journal of Experimental Psychology. Human Perception and Performance

|April 13, 2026

Summary

Listeners are biased to detect changes in speech, especially in their known languages. This study shows that language background influences how well people notice speech changes in complex sound environments.

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Area of Science:

Cognitive Psychology
Auditory Perception
Linguistic Neuroscience

Background:

Humans often encounter complex auditory scenes with multiple sound sources.
A known bias exists for detecting changes in speech over other environmental sounds.
The influence of language background on this speech bias is not well understood.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate whether listeners' language backgrounds affect their ability to detect changes in speech within complex auditory environments.
To determine if the attentional bias towards speech is universal or language-specific.

Main Methods:

A change detection task was employed with adult listeners from diverse language backgrounds (English monolingual, English-Mandarin bilingual, English-other language bilingual).
Participants evaluated auditory scenes containing speech (English and Mandarin), music, environmental, and animal sounds.
Performance was measured by the accuracy in identifying whether auditory scenes remained the same or changed.

Main Results:

The study replicated the general attentional bias towards speech.
English-Mandarin bilinguals demonstrated equal proficiency in detecting changes in both English and Mandarin speech.
Listeners showed a bias towards speech in their known languages, not just all human speech.

Conclusions:

Linguistic experience significantly shapes auditory perception and memory for communicative sounds.
The bias towards speech in complex auditory scenes is influenced by familiarity with the language.
This research highlights the role of language in encoding and prioritizing auditory information in ecologically relevant settings.