Cross-linguistic Influences on Sentence Accent Detection in Background Noise.
Odette Scharenborg, Sofoklis Kakouros, Brechtje Post and 1 others
PMID 30606083WHAT IT FOUND
Healthy adult listeners detected more target sounds when the key word carried sentence accent.
Noise lowered detection only at the worst level, and non-native groups used different acoustic cues.
Key findings
01More target phonemes were detected when the target-bearing word carried sentence accent than when it was deaccented (90.5% vs. 87.1%).
02Only the Dutch non-native listeners detected significantly fewer target phonemes than the native English listeners (85.3% vs. 91.8%), and the detrimental effect of noise was similar across listener groups.
03The groups used different acoustic cues for detection: English and Dutch primarily used energy, Dutch also duration, Finnish used F0, and French used energy, F0, and spectral tilt.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they found
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What it does not show
The participants were healthy university students with no reported hearing, speech, or language problems, so the results do not show how patients with communication disorders would perform. The outcome was a laboratory target-phoneme detection task, not a clinical measure of everyday speech comprehension or therapy outcome. The French group was smaller than the other groups and had lower English proficiency, which makes comparisons with the Dutch and Finnish groups less straightforward. The paper is labelled as a randomized controlled trial, but randomisation was only to stimulus lists, not to a treatment. The post-experiment word recognition task was difficult and produced scores only somewhat above chance, so it gives limited assurance that participants understood the sentences.
Declared interests
Funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research; the paper reports a Vidi grant awarded to Odette Scharenborg.
The easy way to misread this
Do not read the finding as evidence that lower English proficiency automatically causes worse sentence accent detection. The French group had significantly lower proficiency than the Dutch and Finnish groups, yet their target phoneme detection was similar to that of native English listeners.