Relationship between listeners' nonnative speech recognition and categorization abilities

Abstract

Enhancement of the perceptual encoding of talker characteristics (indexical information) in speech can facilitate listeners' recognition of linguistic content. The present study explored this indexical-linguistic relationship in nonnative speech processing by examining listeners' performance on two tasks: nonnative accent categorization and nonnative speech-in-noise recognition. Results indicated substantial variability across listeners in their performance on both the accent categorization and nonnative speech recognition tasks. Moreover, listeners' accent categorization performance correlated with their nonnative speech-in-noise recognition performance. These results suggest that having more robust indexical representations for nonnative accents may allow listeners to more accurately recognize the linguistic content of nonnative speech.

Fig. 1.

Mean accuracies for the accent categorization and nonnative speech-in-noise transcription tasks, plotted for each talker (A on left) and for each listener (B on right). In (A), each point represents a talker and is identified with the initial letter of the talker's native language followed by a number (1–4). Talkers identified by number 1 or 2 are male talkers; talkers identified by number 3 or 4 are female talkers. (Examples: F1 is a French male; M4 is a Mandarin female.) In (B), each point is a listener.