Department of Speech, Hearing and Phonetic Sciences, Division of Psychology and Language Sciences, University College London, Chandler House, 2 Wakefield Street, London WC1N 1PF, United Kingdom.
J Acoust Soc Am. 2010 Sep;128(3):1357-65. doi: 10.1121/1.3466857.
Previous work has shown that accents affect speech recognition accuracy in noise, with intelligibility being modulated by the similarity between the talkers' and listeners' accents, particularly in the case where they have different L1s. The present study examined the contribution of prosody to recognizing native (L1) and non-native (L2) speech in noise, and how this is affected by the listener's L2 experience. A group of monolingual English listeners and two groups of French listeners with varying L2 English experience were presented with English sentences produced by L1 and L2 (French) speakers. The stimuli were digitally processed to exchange the pitch and segment durations between recordings of the same sentences produced by different speakers (e.g., imposing a French-accented prosody onto recordings made from English speakers). The results revealed that English listeners were more accurate at recognizing L1 English with English prosody, the French inexperienced listeners were more accurate at recognizing French-accented speech with French prosody, and the French experienced listeners varied in the cues that they used depending on the noise level, showing more flexibility of processing. The use of prosodic cues in noise thus appears to be modulated by language experience and varies according to listening context.
先前的工作表明，口音会影响噪声环境下的语音识别准确性，言语者和听者的口音相似程度会影响可理解度，尤其是在他们的母语不同的情况下。本研究考察了韵律在识别母语（L1）和非母语（L2）语音中的作用，以及这如何受到听者的 L2 经验的影响。一组以英语为母语的听众和两组具有不同 L2 英语经验的法国听众，分别听取了母语为英语和 L2（法语）的说话者所说的英语句子。刺激物经过数字处理，将同一句子由不同说话者录制的音高和音段时长进行交换（例如，将法语口音的韵律强加于英语说话者的录音上）。结果表明，英语听众在识别具有英语韵律的母语英语时更为准确，没有法语经验的听众在识别具有法语韵律的法语口音语音时更为准确，而有法语经验的听众则根据噪声水平使用不同的线索，表现出处理方式的更大灵活性。因此，在噪声中使用韵律线索似乎受到语言经验的调节，并且根据听力环境而有所不同。
