Word identification of New Zealand English by native Japanese listeners with and without exposure to New Zealand English

[摘要] With English being one of the most spoken languages in the world and has been used as a lingua franca for many years, there are many studies examining non-native English listeners’ speech intelligibility in various conditions, such as noisy and reverberant environments, e.g., [1,2]. The stimuli used usually come from pre-recorded corpora in a variety of English at the place of the study. In a recent study, we examined the benefit listeners with different English familiarity get from spatial cues when listening to speech in noise from different directions [3]. As the study was mainly conducted in New Zealand, we used a New Zealand English (NZE) corpus so that participants in the control group were listening to an English variety they were native in. To vary familiarity in New Zealand English as well as exposure to English in general, we also recruited a group of listeners in Japan who has not been immersed in an English speaking country (unpublished data). In order for such an experiment to have valid conclusions that differences in performance were not affected by the corpus in terms of the difficulty of the words and the variety of English, we needed to obtain a baseline of how well non-native listeners can understand the corpus without any distortion. The current paper reports on the findings from this baseline test.

[学科分类] 声学和超声波

[关键词] Speech intelligibility;Error confusion;Second language acquisition