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Intelligibility of American English vowels of native and non-native speakers in quiet and speech-shaped noise*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 September 2012

CHANG LIU  and
SU-HYUN JIN
CHANG LIU*
Affiliation:
Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, The University of Texas at Austin
SU-HYUN JIN
Affiliation:
Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, The University of Texas at Austin
*
Address for correspondence: Chang Liu, Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, The University of Texas at Austin, 1 University Station A1100, Austin, TX 78712, USA[email protected]
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Abstract

This study examined intelligibility of twelve American English vowels produced by English, Chinese, and Korean native speakers in quiet and speech-shaped noise in which vowels were presented at six sensation levels from 0 dB to 10 dB. The slopes of vowel intelligibility functions and the processing time for listeners to identify vowels were dependent on speakers’ language backgrounds and non-native speakers’ vowel intelligibility in quiet. These results indicated that noise background affected non-native speakers’ vowel intelligibility more greatly than native speakers, possibly due to the acoustic deviations in non-native speech and lack of listeners’ experience to non-native produced speech.

Keywords

vowel intelligibilitypsychometric functionnon-native speakers
Type
Research Notes
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 16 , Issue 1 , January 2013 , pp. 206 - 218
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

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Footnotes

*

Special thanks were given to Chia-Tsen Chen for her help in data analysis. The authors also would like to thank Catherine Rogers for her comments on this study. The authors are grateful to three anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments on the earlier drafts of this manuscript. This study was supported by the University of Texas at Austin Research Grant.

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