English Speakers' Perception of Non-native Vowel Contrasts in Adverse Listening Conditions: A Discrimination Study on the German Front Rounded Vowels /y/ and /ø/.
Stephanie Kaucke, Marcel Schlechtweg
PMID 38853599WHAT IT FOUND
Native English speakers struggle to distinguish German front rounded vowels from back vowels in quiet, treating them as the same sound.
In heavy white noise, this confusion shifts: both English and German listeners fail to tell front unrounded and front rounded vowels apart, with accuracy dropping to 14% for English speakers.
Key findings
01In quiet conditions, native English speakers had significant difficulty discriminating the German front rounded vowel /y/ from the back rounded vowel /u/, with only 57% accuracy.
02As noise increased, the primary difficulty for English speakers shifted from distinguishing rounded from unrounded vowels to distinguishing front unrounded from front rounded vowels, with accuracy for /i/-/y/ dropping to 14% at 0 dB SNR.
03Native German speakers, while performing at ceiling in quiet, also showed a native advantage but still struggled significantly with front vowel contrasts in heavy noise, with accuracy dropping to 20% for /i/-/y/.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The study used white noise, which masks frequencies differently than the multitalker babble or speech-shaped noise often encountered in real-world clinical or social settings. Participants listened to pseudowords, removing lexical and semantic cues that typically help listeners recover from noise, which may make the task more difficult than real-life conversation. The study was conducted online, so hearing screening was based on self-report rather than audiometric verification. English participants varied in their native dialects (e.g., American, British), which may have influenced how they categorized vowels like /ø/.
Declared interests
Funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation). No other conflicts of interest reported.
The easy way to misread this
Do not assume that difficulty distinguishing front rounded vowels in quiet translates directly to the same difficulty in noise. The study found a perceptual shift: in heavy noise, the primary failure point moved from distinguishing rounded from back vowels to distinguishing front unrounded from front rounded vowels for both language groups.