Native and Non-native Speech Perception by Hearing-Impaired Listeners in Noise- and Speech Maskers. 2015

Lisa Kilman, and Adriana Zekveld, and Mathias Hällgren, and Jerker Rönnberg
Department of Behavioral Sciences and Learning, Linköping University, Linköping, Sweden Linnaeus Centre HEAD, The Swedish Institute for Disability Research, Linköping University, Linköping, Sweden lisa.kilman@liu.se.

This study evaluated how hearing-impaired listeners perceive native (Swedish) and nonnative (English) speech in the presence of noise- and speech maskers. Speech reception thresholds were measured for four different masker types for each target language. The maskers consisted of stationary and fluctuating noise and two-talker babble in Swedish and English. Twenty-three hearing-impaired native Swedish listeners participated, aged between 28 and 65 years. The participants also performed cognitive tests of working memory capacity in Swedish and English, nonverbal reasoning, and an English proficiency test. Results indicated that the speech maskers were more interfering than the noise maskers in both target languages. The larger need for phonetic and semantic cues in a nonnative language makes a stationary masker relatively more challenging than a fluctuating-noise masker. Better hearing acuity (pure tone average) was associated with better perception of the target speech in Swedish, and better English proficiency was associated with better speech perception in English. Larger working memory and better pure tone averages were related to the better perception of speech masked with fluctuating noise in the nonnative language. This suggests that both are relevant in highly taxing conditions. A large variance in performance between the listeners was observed, especially for speech perception in the nonnative language.

UI MeSH Term Description Entries
D007802 Language A verbal or nonverbal means of communicating ideas or feelings. Dialect,Dialects,Languages
D008297 Male Males
D008875 Middle Aged An adult aged 45 - 64 years. Middle Age
D009622 Noise Any sound which is unwanted or interferes with HEARING other sounds. Noise Pollution,Noises,Pollution, Noise
D010470 Perceptual Masking The interference of one perceptual stimulus with another causing a decrease or lessening in perceptual effectiveness. Masking, Perceptual,Maskings, Perceptual,Perceptual Maskings
D010700 Phonetics The science or study of speech sounds and their production, transmission, and reception, and their analysis, classification, and transcription. (Random House Unabridged Dictionary, 2d ed) Speech Sounds,Sound, Speech,Sounds, Speech,Speech Sound
D003463 Cues Signals for an action; that specific portion of a perceptual field or pattern of stimuli to which a subject has learned to respond. Cue
D005260 Female Females
D006801 Humans Members of the species Homo sapiens. Homo sapiens,Man (Taxonomy),Human,Man, Modern,Modern Man
D000161 Acoustic Stimulation Use of sound to elicit a response in the nervous system. Auditory Stimulation,Stimulation, Acoustic,Stimulation, Auditory

Related Publications

Lisa Kilman, and Adriana Zekveld, and Mathias Hällgren, and Jerker Rönnberg
April 2013, Journal of the American Academy of Audiology,
Lisa Kilman, and Adriana Zekveld, and Mathias Hällgren, and Jerker Rönnberg
November 1995, Journal of the American Academy of Audiology,
Lisa Kilman, and Adriana Zekveld, and Mathias Hällgren, and Jerker Rönnberg
February 2019, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America,
Lisa Kilman, and Adriana Zekveld, and Mathias Hällgren, and Jerker Rönnberg
June 2012, Journal of speech, language, and hearing research : JSLHR,
Lisa Kilman, and Adriana Zekveld, and Mathias Hällgren, and Jerker Rönnberg
June 1990, Journal of speech and hearing research,
Lisa Kilman, and Adriana Zekveld, and Mathias Hällgren, and Jerker Rönnberg
July 1980, The Journal of auditory research,
Lisa Kilman, and Adriana Zekveld, and Mathias Hällgren, and Jerker Rönnberg
January 2008, Journal of basic and clinical physiology and pharmacology,
Lisa Kilman, and Adriana Zekveld, and Mathias Hällgren, and Jerker Rönnberg
January 2015, PloS one,
Lisa Kilman, and Adriana Zekveld, and Mathias Hällgren, and Jerker Rönnberg
October 1988, Aviation, space, and environmental medicine,
Lisa Kilman, and Adriana Zekveld, and Mathias Hällgren, and Jerker Rönnberg
October 1989, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America,
Copied contents to your clipboard!