Sentence recognition in noise for English-, Chinese-, and Korean-native listeners.

Abstract

The present study aims to investigate the effects of background noise on English sentence recognition for English-native (EN), Chinese-native (CN), and Korean-native (KN) listeners. The hearing in Noise Test (HINT) [Nilsson et al., (1994)] was used to measure the percent correct word identification in both quiet and noise conditions. Each sentence consists of uniform length with six syllables spoken by a female talker with general unaccented dialect-free American English. Two types of noise, multitalker babble and long-term speech shaped noise (LTSSN), were presented at various singal-to-noise ratios SNRs. Preliminary data demonstrated that first, the sentence recognition of non-native listeners was significantly lower than native listeners in both quiet and noise conditions; second, both native and non-native listeners showed significant amount of masking release at each SNR (−10, −5, and 0 dB SNRs); third, there was substantial individual variability in sentence recognition within each non-native group. This variability might be related with high variability in phoneme recognition in noise for the non-native individuals.