Increase in Speech Recognition due to Linguistic Mismatch Between Target and Masker Speech: Monolingual and Simultaneous Bilingual Performance

Abstract

PURPOSE: To examine whether improved speech recognition during linguistically mismatched target-masker experiments is due to linguistic unfamiliarity of the masker speech or linguistic dissimilarity between the target and masker speech. METHOD: Monolingual English speakers (n = 20) and English-Greek simultaneous bilinguals (n = 20) listened to English sentences in the presence of competing English and Greek speech. Data were analyzed using mixed-effects regression models to determine differences in English recogition performance between the 2 groups and 2 masker conditions. RESULTS: Results indicated that English sentence recognition for monolinguals and simultaneous English-Greek bilinguals improved when the masker speech changed from competing English to competing Greek speech. CONCLUSION: The improvement in speech recognition that has been observed for linguistically mismatched target-masker experiments cannot be simply explained by the masker language being linguistically unknown or unfamiliar to the listeners. Listeners can improve their speech recognition in linguistically mismatched target-masker experiments even when the listener is able to obtain meaningful linguistic information from the masker speech.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 46 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.