Effects of Interfering Speech in a Foreign Language on Speech Understanding

Abstract

Measuring language proficiency is a challenging process that typically includes a combination of standardized test and self-reporting assessments. The disadvantage of these assessments is that the standardized test can be time consuming, and the self-reported measures can be biased. To address these disadvantages, current research has studied the effects of interfering speech in a foreign language and language proficiency levels on speech understanding. To evaluate whether there is a correlation between language proficiency levels and performance scores on speech-in-speech recognition task we must first test the validity of speech-in-speech recognition task. To do so, we had monolingual English listeners participate in a speech-in-speech recognition task to see if they demonstrate a linguistic release from masking. We use monolingual English listeners because we hypothesize that bilingual listeners with high proficiency in their second language will have similar scores to the monolingual listeners. So, monolingual listeners scores must be included to compare with the bilingual listeners. We then plan on having bilingual participants take part in two tasks. In the first task will be the speech-inspeech recognition task, where participants will hear a target sentence in the presence of foreign and native background noise, with the job of correctly identifying the color and number heard from the target. The next task will be a standard language proficiency task. We expect to see a positive correlation with higher language proficiency levels correlating to higher performance scores on speech-in-speech recognition task. Making speech-in-speech recognition task an alternative way of measuring language proficiency,

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Waller