2007/04/25

Bradlow, A. R. & Pisoni, D. B. (1999). Recognition of spoken words by native and non-native listeners: Talker-, listener-, and item-related factors. Journal of Acoustical Society of America, 106(4), Pt.1, 2074–2085.

Presentation: Sally
Summary: Angela

The authors wanted to see whether talkers, listeners, and items would affect speech perception. Their first prediction was that when there was talker variation, listeners would have a harder time in perceiving what is spoken to them. However, after a listener gets familiar with a particular speaker’s voice, the familiarity will assist the listener to understand the talker’s speech. The authors also predicted that when the lexicon that is presented to the listeners are divided into ‘easy’ and ‘hard’ ones, listeners had a harder time in comprehending the hard words than the easy ones. Results of the first experiment showed that familiarity facilitated word recognition, and hard words were less intelligible than easy ones. On the other hand, though the second experiment on non-native speakers showed the same tendency, the gap between the scores they obtained from the hard and easy words was larger than that of the native speakers, and the average scores were lower. This suggested that the failure of discriminating L2 sounds may be the main reason why non-native speakers and native speakers are different in their performance of word recognition.