Non-native speakers perform poorer than native speakers in Japanese speech recognition in reverberation

Abstract

Reverberation affects perceptual performance, especially non-native listeners, elderly people, and people with hearing impairments. Native Japanese speakers confused some Japanese consonants and they failed to distinguish Japanese length contrast in reverberation [Arai et al., Proc. Autumn Meet. Acoust. Soc. Jpn., 2016]. The current study examined degradation degree of non-native speakers (native English speakers) in Japanese speech recognition in reverberation, using the same experiment settings with the previous study. There were two sets of stimulus: 1) Japanese consonant-vowel (CV) syllables, 2) non-words varying in duration of a certain vowel/consonant along durational continuum. In the results, although non-native speakers confused consonants even in non-reverberant condition, the number of their confusion in reverberation was larger than that in non-reverberant condition. Confusion of non-native speakers in reverberation was much more than that of native speakers. In addition, the results indicated that non-native speakers could hardly distinguish the length contrast of Japanese in reverberation. The proportion of “long” responses did not change sharply in the perception of vowel continuum, while native speakers changed their responses at some points on the continuum. The results suggest that learners need training for listening to speech sounds in reverberation.