English Speakers’ Perception of Non-native Vowel Contrasts in Adverse Listening Conditions: A Discrimination Study on the German Front Rounded Vowels /y/ and /ø

• Published in: Language and speech Vol. 68; no. 1; pp. 162 - 180
• Main Authors: Kaucke, Stephanie, Schlechtweg, Marcel
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: London, England SAGE Publications 01.03.2025; Sage Publications Ltd
• Subjects: Acoustic Stimulation; Adult; Control Groups; Discrimination Learning; Discrimination tasks; Discrimination, Psychological; English language; Female; German language; Germany; Humans; Language; Male; Multilingualism; Noise - adverse effects; Nonwords; Original; Perceptual Masking; Phonemes; Phonetics; Signal to noise ratio; Speech; Speech Acoustics; Speech Discrimination Tests; Speech Intelligibility; Speech Perception; Voice Quality; Vowels; Young Adult; Germany; vowels; discrimination task; Non-native speech perception; speech in noise
• ISSN: 0023-8309; 1756-6053; 1756-6053
• DOI: 10.1177/00238309241254350

Previous research has shown that it is difficult for English speakers to distinguish the front rounded vowels /y/ and /ø/ from the back rounded vowels /u/ and /o/. In this study, we examine the effect of noise on this perceptual difficulty. In an Oddity Discrimination Task, English speakers without any knowledge of German were asked to discriminate between German-sounding pseudowords varying in the vowel both in quiet and in white noise at two signal-to-noise ratios (8 and 0 dB). In test trials, vowels of the same height were contrasted with each other, whereas a contrast with /a/ served as a control trial. Results revealed that a contrast with /a/ remained stable in every listening condition for both high and mid vowels. When contrasting vowels of the same height, however, there was a perceptual shift along the F2 dimension as the noise level increased. Although the /ø/-/o/ and particularly /y/-/u/ contrasts were the most difficult in quiet, accuracy on /i/-/y/ and /e/-/ø/ trials decreased immensely when the speech signal was masked. The German control group showed the same pattern, albeit less severe than the non-native group, suggesting that even in low-level tasks with pseudowords, there is a native advantage in speech perception in noise.