Sentence recognition for native and non-native English listeners in quiet and babble: Effects of contextual cues

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to investigate the difference between English-native (EN) listeners and Chinese-native (CN) listeners using contextual cues to perceive speech in quiet and four-talker babble in English. Three types of sentences served as speech stimuli: high (semantic and syntactic cues), low (syntactic cues), and zero predictability. Results showed that CN listeners primarily relied on semantic information when perceiving speech, whereas EN listeners used both semantic and syntactic cues more equally. Moreover, the four-talker babble enlarged the group difference similarly across the three types of sentences, indicating that non-native listeners' greater-than-native difficulty in noise depended on speech materials.