Informational masking of six-talker babble on Mandarin Chinese vowel and tone identification: Comparison between native Chinese and Korean listeners

Abstract

The goal of this study was to investigate the informational masking (IM) of Mandarin six-talker babble on Mandarin vowel and tone perception for native Chinese and Korean speakers with high and medium Mandarin proficiency. Mandarin Chinese speech sounds (vowel plus tone) were presented in quiet and two noises: six-talker babble and babble-modulated noise, which was spectrally and temporally matched with babble. The IM was computed as the difference in the identification scores between the two types of noises. Overall, all the four factors (listener group, noise type, vowel-plus-tone category, and SNR) significantly affected participants’ identification of Mandarin stimuli. Particularly, in both quiet and noisy conditions, Chinese listeners had comparable performance with Korean listeners with high Mandarin proficiency, while Chinese listeners significantly outperformed Korean listeners with medium Mandarin proficiency. However, no significant difference was found in IM among the listener groups. In conclusion, at the syllabic level, highly-proficient Korean listeners had native-like performance of Mandarin vowel and tone identification in quiet and noise, whereas Korean listeners with medium proficiency had greater difficulty, specifically in noise, likely due to their lower capacity to process phonemic and tonal information, rather than the IM of babble.