The influence of sexual orientation on vowel production.
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Biomedical subjects
Publications and source records attributed to Tessa Bent.
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This study investigated how native language background influences the intelligibility of speech by non-native talkers for non-native listeners from either the same or a different native language background as the talker. Native talkers of Chinese (n = 2), Korean (n = 2), and English (n = 1) were recorded reading simple English sentences. Native listeners of English (n = 21), Chinese (n = 21), Korean (n = 10), and a mixed group from various native language backgrounds (n = 12) then performed a sentence recognition task with the recordings from the five talkers. Results showed that for native English listeners, the native English talker was most intelligible. However, for non-native listeners, speech from a relatively high proficiency non-native talker from the same native language background was as intelligible as speech from a native talker, giving rise to the "matched interlanguage speech intelligibility benefit." Furthermore, this interlanguage intelligibility benefit extended to the situation where the non-native talker and listeners came from different language backgrounds, giving rise to the "mismatched interlanguage speech intelligibility benefit." These findings shed light on the nature of the talker-listener interaction during speech communication.
Previous work has established that naturally produced clear speech is more intelligible than conversational speech for adult hearing-impaired listeners and normal-hearing listeners under degraded listening conditions. The major goal of the present study was to investigate the extent to which naturally produced clear speech is an effective intelligibility enhancement strategy for non-native listeners. Thirty-two non-native and 32 native listeners were presented with naturally produced English sentences. Factors that varied were speaking style (conversational versus clear), signal-to-noise ratio (-4 versus -8 dB) and talker (one male versus one female). Results showed that while native listeners derived a substantial benefit from naturally produced clear speech (an improvement of about 16 rau units on a keyword-correct count), non-native listeners exhibited only a small clear speech effect (an improvement of only 5 rau units). This relatively small clear speech effect for non-native listeners is interpreted as a consequence of the fact that clear speech is essentially native-listener oriented, and therefore is only beneficial to listeners with extensive experience with the sound structure of the target language.