Division of Communication Sciences and Disorders, Ohio University, Athens, Ohio 45701, USA.
J Acoust Soc Am. 2012 Aug;132(2):1130-40. doi: 10.1121/1.4730883.
Speaker variability and noise are two common sources of acoustic variability. The goal of this study was to examine whether these two sources of acoustic variability affected native and non-native perception of Mandarin fricatives to different degrees. Multispeaker Mandarin fricative stimuli were presented to 40 native and 52 non-native listeners in two presentation formats (blocked by speaker and mixed across speakers). The stimuli were also mixed with speech-shaped noise to create five levels of signal-to- noise ratios. The results showed that noise affected non-native identification disproportionately. By contrast, the effect of speaker variability was comparable between the native and non-native listeners. Confusion patterns were interpreted with reference to the results of acoustic analysis, suggesting native and non-native listeners used distinct acoustic cues for fricative identification. It was concluded that not all sources of acoustic variability are treated equally by native and non-native listeners. Whereas noise compromised non-native fricative perception disproportionately, speaker variability did not pose a special challenge to the non-native listeners.
说话人变异和噪声是两种常见的声学变异源。本研究的目的是检验这两种声学变异源是否对母语者和非母语者感知普通话摩擦音的程度有不同的影响。多说话人普通话摩擦音刺激分别呈现给 40 名母语者和 52 名非母语者，呈现方式有两种（按说话人分组和混合说话人）。刺激还与语音噪声混合，以创建五个信噪比水平。结果表明，噪声对非母语者的识别有不成比例的影响。相比之下，说话人变异的影响在母语者和非母语者之间相当。通过参考声学分析的结果来解释混淆模式，表明母语者和非母语者使用不同的声学线索来进行摩擦音识别。结论是，并非所有的声学变异源都被母语者和非母语者同等对待。虽然噪声对非母语者的摩擦音感知有不成比例的影响，但说话人变异并没有对非母语者造成特殊的挑战。
