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How does the presence of background noise affect thecognitive processes underlying spoken-word recognition? Andhow do these effects differ in native and non-native languagelisteners? We addressed these questions using artificial neural-network modelling. We trained a deep auto-encoderarchitecture on binary phonological and semanticrepresentations of 121 English and Dutch translationequivalents. We also varied exposure to the two languages togenerate ‘native English’ and ‘non-native English’ trainednetworks. These networks captured key effects in theperformance (accuracy rates and the number of erroneousresponses per word stimulus) of English and Dutch listeners inan offline English spoken-word identification experiment(Scharenborg et al., 2017), which considered clean and noisylistening conditions and three intensities of speech-shapednoise, applied word-initially or word-finally. Our simulationssuggested that the effects of noise on native and non-nativelistening are comparable and can be accounted for within thesame cognitive architecture for spoken-word recognition.

Listeners frequently recognize spoken words in the presence of background noise. Previous research has shown that noise reduces phoneme intelligibility and hampers spoken-word recognition – especially for non-native listeners. In the present study, we investigated how noise influences lexical competition in both the non-native and the native language, reflecting the degree to which both languages are co-activated. We recorded the eye movements of native Dutch participants as they listened to English sentences containing a target word while looking at displays containing four objects. On target-present trials, the visual referent depicting the target word was present, along with three unrelated distractors. On target-absent trials, the target object (e.g., wizard) was absent. Instead, the display contained an English competitor, overlapping with the English target in phonological onset (e.g., window), a Dutch competitor, overlapping with the English target in phonological onset (e.g., wimpel, pennant), and two unrelated distractors. Half of the sentences was masked by speech-shaped noise; the other half was presented in quiet. Compared to speech in quiet, noise delayed fixations to the target objects on target-present trials. For target-absent trials, we observed that the likelihood for fixation biases towards the English and Dutch onset competitors (over the unrelated distractors) was larger in noise than in quiet. Our data thus show that the presence of background noise increases lexical competition in the task-relevant non-native (English) and in the task-irrelevant native (Dutch) language. The latter reflects stronger interference of one's native language during non-native spoken-word recognition under adverse conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Oral communication often takes place in noisy environments, which challenge spoken‐word recognition. Previous research has suggested that the presence of background noise extends the number of candidate words competing with the target word for recognition and that this extension affects the time course and accuracy of spoken‐word recognition. In this study, we further investigated the temporal dynamics of competition processes in the presence of background noise, and how these vary in listeners with different language proficiency (i.e., native and non‐native) using computational modeling. We developed ListenIN (Listen‐In‐Noise), a neural‐network model based on an autoencoder architecture, which learns to map phonological forms onto meanings in two languages and simulates native and non‐native spoken‐word comprehension. We also examined the model's activation states during online spoken‐word recognition. These analyses demonstrated that the presence of background noise increases the number of competitor words, which are engaged in phonological competition and that this happens in similar ways intra and interlinguistically and in native and non‐native listening. Taken together, our results support accounts positing a "many‐additional‐competitors scenario" for the effects of noise on spoken‐word recognition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates whether sentence accent detection in a non-native language is dependent on (relative) similarity between prosodic cues to accent between the non-native and the native language, and whether cross-linguistic differences in the use of local and more widely distributed (i.e., non-local) cues to sentence accent detection lead to differential effects of the presence of background noise on sentence accent detection in a non-native language. We compared Dutch, Finnish, and French non-native listeners of English, whose cueing and use of prosodic prominence is gradually further removed from English, and compared their results on a phoneme monitoring task in different levels of noise and a quiet condition to those of native listeners. Overall phoneme detection performance was high for the native and the non-native listeners, but deteriorated to the same extent in the presence of background noise. Crucially, relative similarity between the prosodic cues to sentence accent of one's native language compared to that of a non-native language does not determine the ability to perceive and use sentence accent for speech perception in that non-native language. Moreover, proficiency in the non-native language is not a straightforward predictor of sentence accent perception performance, although high proficiency in a non-native language can seemingly overcome certain differences at the prosodic level between the native and non-native language. Instead, performance is determined by the extent to which listeners rely on local cues (English and Dutch) versus cues that are more distributed (Finnish and French), as more distributed cues survive the presence of background noise better. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights • Non-native spoken-word recognition is harder than native spoken-word recognition. • The effect of background noise is similar in native and non-native listening. • Native and non-native listening have the same underlying cognitive architecture. • Background noise has an effect on all cognitive speech recognition processes. • Language exposure determines for a large part spoken-word recognition performance. Abstract There is ample evidence that recognising words in a non-native language is more difficult than in a native language, even for those with a high proficiency in the non-native language involved, and particularly in the presence of background noise. Why is this the case? To answer this question, this paper provides a systematic review of the literature on non-native spoken-word recognition in the presence of background noise, and posits an updated theory on the effect of background noise on native and non-native spoken-word recognition. The picture that arises is that although spoken-word recognition in the presence of background noise is harder in a non-native language than in one's native language, this difference is not due to a differential effect of background noise on native and non-native listening. Rather, it can be explained by differences in language exposure, which influences the uptake and use of phonetic and contextual information in the speech signal for spoken-word recognition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper shows that the effect of different types of noise on recognition of different phonemes by native versus non-native listeners is highly variable, even within classes of phonemes with the same manner or place of articulation. In a phoneme identification experiment, English and Dutch listeners heard all 24 English consonants in VCV stimuli in quiet and in three types of noise: competing talker, speech-shaped noise, and modulated speech-shaped noise (all with SNRs of −6dB). Differential effects of noise type for English and Dutch listeners were found for eight consonants (/p t k g m n ŋ r/) but not for the other 16 consonants. For those eight consonants, effects were again highly variable: each noise type hindered non-native listeners more than native listeners for some of the target sounds, but none of the noise types did so for all of the target sounds, not even for phonemes with the same manner or place of articulation. The results imply that the noise types employed will strongly affect the outcomes of any study of native and non-native speech perception in noise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Processing speech in a non-native language requires listeners to cope with influences from their first language and to overcome the effects of limited exposure and experience. These factors may be particularly important when listening in adverse conditions. However, native listeners also suffer in noise, and the intelligibility of speech in noise clearly depends on factors which are independent of a listener’s first language. The current study explored the issue of language-independence by comparing the responses of eight listener groups differing in native language when confronted with the task of identifying English intervocalic consonants in three masker backgrounds, viz. stationary speech-shaped noise, temporally-modulated speech-shaped noise and competing English speech. The study analysed the effects of (i) noise type, (ii) speaker, (iii) vowel context, (iv) consonant, (v) phonetic feature classes, (vi) stress position, (vii) gender and (viii) stimulus onset relative to noise onset. A significant degree of similarity in the response to many of these factors was evident across all eight language groups, suggesting that acoustic and auditory considerations play a large rôle in determining intelligibility. Language-specific influences were observed in the rankings of individual consonants and in the masking effect of competing speech relative to speech-modulated noise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is ample evidence that both native and non-native listeners deal with speech variation by quickly tuning into a speaker and adjusting their phonetic categories according to the speaker's ambiguous pronunciation. This process is called lexically-guided perceptual learning. Moreover, the presence of noise in the speech signal has previously been shown to change the word competition process by increasing the number of candidate words competing for recognition and slowing down the recognition process. Given that reliable lexical information should be available quickly to induce lexically-guided perceptual learning and that word recognition is slowed down in the presence of noise, and especially so for non-native listeners, the present study investigated whether noise interferes with lexically-guided perceptual learning in native and non-native listening. Native English and Dutch listeners were exposed to a story in English in clean speech or with stretches of noise. All the /l/ and /ɹ/ sounds in the story were replaced with an ambiguous sound half-way between /l/ and /ɹ/. Although noise altered the pattern of responses for the non-native listeners in a subsequent phonetic categorization task, both native and non-native listeners demonstrated lexically-guided perceptual learning in both clean and noisy listening conditions. We argue that the robustness of perceptual learning in the presence of intermittent noise for both native and non-native listeners is additional evidence for the remarkable flexibility of native and non-native perceptual systems even in adverse listening conditions. • Native and non-native listeners flexibly adapt to speaker's ambiguous pronunciations. • Stretches of noise in the signal do not disrupt perceptual adaptation. • Noise alters the perception of the ambiguous sound for non-native listeners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]