Publications

The difficulty of listening to speech in noise is exacerbatedwhen the speech is in the listener’s L2 rather than L1. In thisstudy, Spanish and Dutch users of English as an L2 identifiedAmerican English consonants in a constant intervocaliccontext. Their performance was compared with that of L1(British English) listeners, under quiet conditions and whenthe speech was masked by speech from another talker or bynoise. Masking affected performance more for the Spanishlisteners than for the L1 listeners, but not for the Dutchlisteners, whose performance was worse than the L1 case toabout the same degree in all conditions. There were, however,large differences in the pattern of results across individualconsonants, which were consistent with differences in howconsonants are identified in the respective L1s.