Effects of noise, reverberation and foreign accent on native and non-native listeners’ performance of English speech comprehension

The May 2016 issue of Journal of the Acoustical Society of America includes a paper by alum Dr. Z. Ellen Peng and Dr. Lily Wang on “Effects of noise, reverberation and foreign accent on native and non-native listeners’ performance of English speech comprehension”! The article presents results from Ellen’s PhD work at the University of Nebraska, indicating that while higher BNLs are generally more detrimental to adult listeners with lower English proficiency, all listeners experience significant comprehension deficits above RC-40 (~48 dBA) with native English talkers. This limit is lower (i.e., above RC-30, or ~38 dBA), however, with non-native talkers. For reverberation, non-native listeners as a group perform best with reverberation times up to 0.6 s, while native listeners perform equally well up to 1.2 s. A matched foreign accent benefit has also been identified, where the negative impact of higher reverberation does not exist for non-native listeners who share the talker’s native language.