Department of Speech, Hearing and Phonetic Sciences, University College London, Chandler House, 2 Wakefield Street, London WC1N 1PF, United Kingdom.
Department of Speech, Hearing and Phonetic Sciences, University College London, Chandler House, 2 Wakefield Street, London WC1N 1PF, United Kingdom.
Cognition. 2018 Oct;179:163-170. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2018.06.001. Epub 2018 Jun 26.
Speech communication in a non-native language (L2) can feel effortful, and the present study suggests that this effort affects both auditory and lexical processing. EEG recordings (electroencephalography) were made from native English (L1) and Korean listeners while they listened to English sentences spoken with two accents (English and Korean) in the presence of a distracting talker. Neural entrainment (i.e., phase locking between the EEG recording and the speech amplitude envelope) was measured for target and distractor talkers. L2 listeners had relatively greater entrainment for target talkers than did L1 listeners, likely because their difficulty with L2 speech recognition caused them to focus more attention on the speech signal. N400 was measured for the final word in each sentence, and L2 listeners had greater lexical processing in high-predictability sentences than did L1 listeners. L1 listeners had greater target-talker entrainment when listening to the more difficult L2 accent than their own L1 accent, and similarly had larger N400 responses for the L2 accent. It thus appears that the increased effort of L2 listeners, as well as L1 listeners understanding L2 speech, modulates their auditory and lexical processing during speech recognition. This may provide a mechanism to compensate for their perceptual challenges under adverse conditions.
非母语（L2）的言语交流可能会让人感到费力，本研究表明，这种努力会影响听觉和词汇处理。研究记录了以英语为母语（L1）和韩语为母语的听者在有干扰者的情况下听两种口音（英语和韩语）的英语句子时的脑电（脑电图）。在目标和干扰者说话者的情况下，测量了神经同步（即 EEG 记录与语音幅度包络之间的相位锁定）。L2 听者的目标说话者同步程度比 L1 听者高，这可能是因为他们在 L2 语音识别方面的困难使他们更关注语音信号。在每个句子的最后一个词上测量了 N400，L2 听者在高可预测性句子中的词汇处理比 L1 听者好。与他们自己的母语口音相比，L1 听者在听更困难的 L2 口音时，目标说话者的同步程度更高，对 L2 口音的 N400 反应也更大。因此，L2 听者的努力程度增加，以及 L1 听者理解 L2 语言，都会在言语识别过程中调节他们的听觉和词汇处理。这可能为他们在不利条件下补偿感知挑战提供了一种机制。
