Publications

Spoken communication in a non-native language is especially difficult in the presence of noise. Thisstudy compared English and Spanish listeners’ perceptions of English intervocalic consonants as afunction of masker type. Three maskers (stationary noise, multitalker babble, and competing speech)provided varying amounts of energetic and informational masking. Competing English and Spanishspeech maskers were used to examine the effect of masker language. Non-native performance fellshort of that of native listeners in quiet, but a larger performance differential was found for allmasking conditions. Both groups performed better in competing speech than in stationary noise, andboth suffered most in babble. Since babble is a less effective energetic masker than stationary noise,these results suggest that non-native listeners are more adversely affected by both energetic andinformational masking.Astrong correlation was found between non-native performance in quiet anddegree of deterioration in noise, suggesting that non-native phonetic category learning can befragile. A small effect of language background was evident: English listeners performed better whenthe competing speech was Spanish.