Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, P.O. Box 310, 6500 AH, Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
Fryske Akademy, Leeuwarden, Netherlands.
Psychon Bull Rev. 2023 Aug;30(4):1549-1563. doi: 10.3758/s13423-022-02233-7. Epub 2022 Dec 21.
Listeners frequently recognize spoken words in the presence of background noise. Previous research has shown that noise reduces phoneme intelligibility and hampers spoken-word recognition - especially for non-native listeners. In the present study, we investigated how noise influences lexical competition in both the non-native and the native language, reflecting the degree to which both languages are co-activated. We recorded the eye movements of native Dutch participants as they listened to English sentences containing a target word while looking at displays containing four objects. On target-present trials, the visual referent depicting the target word was present, along with three unrelated distractors. On target-absent trials, the target object (e.g., wizard) was absent. Instead, the display contained an English competitor, overlapping with the English target in phonological onset (e.g., window), a Dutch competitor, overlapping with the English target in phonological onset (e.g., wimpel, pennant), and two unrelated distractors. Half of the sentences was masked by speech-shaped noise; the other half was presented in quiet. Compared to speech in quiet, noise delayed fixations to the target objects on target-present trials. For target-absent trials, we observed that the likelihood for fixation biases towards the English and Dutch onset competitors (over the unrelated distractors) was larger in noise than in quiet. Our data thus show that the presence of background noise increases lexical competition in the task-relevant non-native (English) and in the task-irrelevant native (Dutch) language. The latter reflects stronger interference of one's native language during non-native spoken-word recognition under adverse conditions.
听众在背景噪音中经常能识别出口语单词。先前的研究表明，噪音会降低音素可懂度，并阻碍口语识别 - 尤其是对于非母语者。在本研究中，我们研究了噪音如何影响非母语和母语中的词汇竞争，反映了两种语言被共同激活的程度。我们记录了母语为荷兰语的参与者的眼动，当他们听英语句子并同时看包含四个物体的显示器时。在目标出现的试验中，描绘目标单词的视觉指称存在，同时还有三个不相关的干扰项。在目标不存在的试验中，目标物体（例如，巫师）不存在。相反，显示器包含一个与英语目标在音素开头重叠的英语竞争者（例如，窗口），一个与英语目标在音素开头重叠的荷兰语竞争者（例如，wimpel，旗帜），以及两个不相关的干扰项。一半的句子被语音形状的噪音掩蔽；另一半则在安静中呈现。与安静中的语音相比，噪音会延迟对目标物体的注视。对于目标不存在的试验，我们观察到在噪音中，注视偏向英语和荷兰语起始竞争者（而不是不相关的干扰项）的可能性大于在安静中。因此，我们的数据表明，背景噪音的存在增加了任务相关的非母语（英语）和任务不相关的母语（荷兰语）中的词汇竞争。后者反映了在不利条件下进行非母语口语识别时，母语的干扰更强。
