Non-native speech perception in adverse conditions: A review <s> Listener type <s> The Modified Rhyme Test (MRT) has been adapted to the needs of the clinical audiologist. Tape recordings of three speakers, one female and two males, were made, evaluated, and assembled in a format... <s> BIB001 </s> Non-native speech perception in adverse conditions: A review <s> Listener type <s> It has long been accepted that children are able to master the sound patterns of a second language with much greater ease than adults. In fact, adults never seem capable of ridding themselves entirely of a “foreign accent”. There have been many attempts to account for this discrepancy in language learning between children and adults in terms of nurture, but, for the most part, these theories have proved inconsistent. It is proposed that it is the nature of the human brain, not its nurture, that is essentially involved here-specifically, that the onset of cerebral dominance, which seems to occur around the age of twelve, inhibits the ability of a person to master the sound patterns of a second language without an impinging foreign accent. <s> BIB002 </s> Non-native speech perception in adverse conditions: A review <s> Listener type <s> In this study, the effect of linguistic experience on the auditory discrimination of words has been examined. 18 subjects, including 6 native and 12 non-native speakers of English, were tested with CID auditory test W-22 in quiet and in the presence of white noise at the signal-to-noise (S/N) ratios of + 12, + 6 and 0 dB. The non-native speakers of English included 6 with 1 year of experience and 6 with 3–4 years of experience speaking English in the USA.In the absence of noise, the results were essentially equivalent for all three groups. As noise level increased, word discrimination deteriorated for all three groups with non-native speakers of English obtaining results significantly poorer than native speakers of English. Linguistic experience and noise levels were significant at the 0.001 level of confidence. It appears that at 0 dB S/N, individual variability of non-native speakers of English, regardless of their original linguistic background, was much smaller than that found for native speakers of E... <s> BIB003 </s> Non-native speech perception in adverse conditions: A review <s> Listener type <s> Speech perception in reverberation was compared for native English speaking and non‐native listeners. The Modified Rhyme Test was recorded with reverberation times (T) of 0.4, 0.8, and1.2 s. Testing was monaural. The mean word identification scores without reverberation were similar for both groups. With T=0.8 and 1.2 s, non‐native listeners scored 10% lower than the native listeners. These results indicate that non‐native listeners who understand English very well in the absence of reverberation might have difficulty understanding speech in the presence of even moderate reverberation. <s> BIB004 </s> Non-native speech perception in adverse conditions: A review <s> Listener type <s> The noise level at which native and non‐native listeners could repeat about 50% of very simple English sentences was measured with an adaptive procedure. The 14 non‐native listeners were primarily native French speaking and were 19 to 53 years old. Four native listeners were 16 to 53 years old. On each trial the listener repeated one sentence presented at 70 dB SPL via loudspeakers in an anechoic chamber. If the entire sentence was correct, the noise level was increased; otherwise it was decreased. the step size was 5 dB until the first reversal and 2 dB thereafter. The speech reception threshold, SRT, was defined as the average noise level of ten trials following the first reversal. Three SRTs were measured for each listener. All listeners could repeat eight practice sentences presented in the quiet with 100% accuracy. The average SRTs were 57 dB SPL for listeners with minimal experience in English, 62 dB SPL for listeners with moderate experience, and 68 dB SPL for listeners with extensive experience. N... <s> BIB005 </s> Non-native speech perception in adverse conditions: A review <s> Listener type <s> English consonant recognition in undegraded and degraded listening conditions was compared for listeners whose primary language was either Japanese or American English. There were ten subjects in each of the two groups, termed the non-native (Japanese) and the native (American) subjects, respectively. The Modified Rhyme Test was degraded either by a babble of voices (S/N = -3 dB) or by a room reverberation (reverberation time, T = 1.2 s). The Japanese subjects performed at a lower level than the American subjects in both noise and reverberation, although the performance difference in the undegraded, quiet condition was relatively small. There was no difference between the scores obtained in noise and in reverberation for either group. A limited-error analysis revealed some differences in type of errors for the groups of listeners. Implications of the results are discussed in terms of the effects of degraded listening conditions on non-native listeners' speech perception. <s> BIB006 </s> Non-native speech perception in adverse conditions: A review <s> Listener type <s> To determine how age of acquisition influences perception of second-language speech, the Speech Perception in Noise (SPIN) test was administered to native Mexican-Spanish-speaking listeners who lea... <s> BIB007 </s> Non-native speech perception in adverse conditions: A review <s> Listener type <s> This study examined the identification of English consonants in noise by native speakers of Italian. The effect of age of first exposure to English was evaluated by comparing three groups of subjects <s> BIB008 </s> Non-native speech perception in adverse conditions: A review <s> Listener type <s> This study examined the recognition of English words by groups of native speakers of Italian who differed in age of arrival in Canada and amount of continued native language use. The dependent variable was the number of words correctly repeated in English sentences presented in noise. Significantly higher word recognition scores were obtained for early than late bilinguals, and for early bilinguals who used Italian seldom than for early bilinguals who used Italian relatively often. A hierarchical regression analysis showed that the native Italian participants' ability to perceive English vowels and consonants accounted for a significant amount of variance in the word-recognition scores independently of age of arrival, amount of L1 use, and length of residence in Canada. The native language use effect was interpreted to have arisen from differences in the extent to which the early bilinguals' Italian phonetic system influenced the representations they developed for English vowels and consonants. <s> BIB009 </s> Non-native speech perception in adverse conditions: A review <s> Listener type <s> Our previous work (Hazan & Simpson, 1998) has shown that increasing the salience of perceptually important regions of nonsense word and sentence materials aids speech perception in noise. This study aimed to extend these findings by investigating the robustness of these enhancement techniques in improving consonant intelligibility for a range of different speakers and for groups of listeners with different language backgrounds. In Experiment 1, nonsense vowel- consonant-vowel (VCV) tokens produced by two female and two male speakers without phonetic training were annotated to highlight segments of the signal corresponding to the consonant constriction/occlusion and vowel onset/offset regions. These regions were selectively amplified to enhance the cues they contained, then combined with speech - shaped noise at 0 dB SNR and presented to normally hearing listeners. Significant improvements in intelligibility were found for all speakers although the extent of the improvement varied across speakers. In Experiment 2, a subset of these stimuli were presented to two groups of learners of English — a Japanese- L1 group and a Spanish - L1 group — and a new group of native- English controls. Results showed a significant effect of enhancement in all listener- groups and similar speaker effects for the non- native and native English listeners. Error patterns were related to the distance between the phonological systems of listeners’ L1 and L2. <s> BIB010 </s> Non-native speech perception in adverse conditions: A review <s> Listener type <s> This study examined the production of English /b/ and the perception of short-lag English /b d g/ tokens by four groups of bilinguals who differed according to their age of arrival (AOA) in Canada from Italy and amount of self-reported native language (L1) use. A clear difference emerged between early bilinguals (mean AOA=8 years) and late bilinguals (mean AOA=20 years). The late bilinguals showed a stronger L1 influence than the early bilinguals did on both the production and perception of English stops. In experiment 2, the late bilinguals produced a larger percentage of prevoiced English /b/ tokens than early bilinguals and native English (NE) speakers did. In experiment 3, the late bilinguals misidentified short-lag English /b d g/ tokens as /p t k/ more often than the early bilinguals and NE speakers did. Experiment 4 revealed that the frequencies with which the bilinguals prevoiced /b d g/ in Italian and English were correlated. The observed differences between the early and late bilinguals were att... <s> BIB011 </s> Non-native speech perception in adverse conditions: A review <s> Listener type <s> Previous research has suggested that child but not adult immigrants to the United States and ::: Canada make regular progress learning English as their length of residence (LOR) increases. If ::: children and adults received the same kind of second language (L2) input, such evidence would ::: support the existence of a critical period for L2 acquisition. The present study compared groups ::: of Chinese adults living in the United States who differed in LOR in order to assess the role of ::: input in adults' naturalistic acquisition of an L2. We assessed the Chinese ::: participants' identification of word-final English consonants (experiment 1), their scores on ::: a 144-item grammaticality judgment test (experiment 2), and their scores on a 45-item listening ::: comprehension test (experiment 3). The Chinese participants were assigned to one of four groups ::: ( n = 15 each) based on LOR in the United States and their primary occupation ::: (students vs. nonstudents). Significantly higher scores were obtained for the students with ::: relatively long LORs than for the students with relatively short LORs in all three experiments. ::: However, the difference between the nonstudents differing in LOR was nonsignificant in each ::: instance. The results suggested that the lack of an effect of LOR in some previous studies may ::: have been due to sampling error. It appears that adults' performance in an L2 will improve ::: measurably over time, but only if they receive a substantial amount of native speaker input. <s> BIB012 </s> Non-native speech perception in adverse conditions: A review <s> Listener type <s> When listening to languages learned at a later age, speech intelligibility is generally lower than when listening to one's native language. The main purpose of this study is to quantify speech intelligibility in noise for specific populations of non-native listeners, only broadly addressing the underlying perceptual and linguistic processing. An easy method is sought to extend these quantitative findings to other listener populations. Dutch subjects listening to Germans and English speech, ranging from reasonable to excellent proficiency in these languages, were found to require a 1-7 dB better speech-to-noise ratio to obtain 50% sentence intelligibility than native listeners. Also, the psychometric function for sentence recognition in noise was found to be shallower for non-native than for native listeners (worst-case slope around the 50% point of 7.5%/dB, compared to 12.6%/dB for native listeners). Differences between native and non-native speech intelligibility are largely predicted by linguistic entropy estimates as derived from a letter guessing task. Less effective use of context effects (especially semantic redundancy) explains the reduced speech intelligibility for non-native listeners. While measuring speech intelligibility for many different populations of listeners (languages, linguistic experience) may be prohibitively time consuming, obtaining predictions of non-native intelligibility from linguistic entropy may help to extend the results of this study to other listener populations. <s> BIB013 </s> Non-native speech perception in adverse conditions: A review <s> Listener type <s> This tutorial provides a review of auditory research conducted with monolingual and bilingual speakers of Spanish and English. Based on a functional view of bilingualism and on auditory research findings showing that the bilingual experience may affect the outcome of auditory research, we discuss methods for improving descriptions of linguistically diverse research participants. The review delves into how the bilingual experience can affect auditory research outcomes and discusses ways in which experimental design can be adjusted when bilingual or monolingual participants are used for research needs. The goal of the tutorial is to increase awareness about the complexities of using bilinguals in auditory research, thereby improving the quality of auditory research involving bilingual research participants. <s> BIB014 </s> Non-native speech perception in adverse conditions: A review <s> Listener type <s> Abstract Objectives: To avoid the accidents induced by confusions of non-native speech perception in the presence of noise at work, this study examined the effect of background noise on the discrimination of English speech for Japanese listeners. Methods: Normal hearing Japanese subjects, who have English learning experience to the level of college graduates, were tested with the CID W-22 word list in quiet settings and in the presence of white, low-frequency weighted (pink noise), or aircraft noise. Results: The discrimination scores were reduced as S/N ratio decreased, and more adversely affected by background white noise than pink or aircraft noise. The individual variability of English word discrimination scores for Japanese listeners was much larger as the S/N ratio decreased. The typical confusions among phoneme were /m/, /n/, and /s/. Conclusions: The results of this study suggested that ineffective use of speech cues and difference in composition of English phonemes from Japanese could be responsible for degraded speech discrimination of non-native speech in noise. Moreover, it was expected that Japanese workers with age related hearing loss at higher frequencies might have great difficulty in perceiving English speech sounds in the presence of noise. <s> BIB015 </s> Non-native speech perception in adverse conditions: A review <s> Listener type <s> Previous work has established that naturally produced clear speech is more intelligible than conversational speech for adult hearing-impaired listeners and normal-hearing listeners under degraded listening conditions. The major goal of the present study was to investigate the extent to which naturally produced clear speech is an effective intelligibility enhancement strategy for non-native listeners. Thirty-two non-native and 32 native listeners were presented with naturally produced English sentences. Factors that varied were speaking style (conversational versus clear), signal-to-noise ratio (-4 versus -8 dB) and talker (one male versus one female). Results showed that while native listeners derived a substantial benefit from naturally produced clear speech (an improvement of about 16 rau units on a keyword-correct count), non-native listeners exhibited only a small clear speech effect (an improvement of only 5 rau units). This relatively small clear speech effect for non-native listeners is interpreted... <s> BIB016 </s> Non-native speech perception in adverse conditions: A review <s> Listener type <s> Recent evidence on the perceptual performance of bilingual listeners suggests that a nonaudibility-based cost exists in processing a second language. That is, when compared to monolingual English speakers and early bilinguals, listeners who acquired English as a second language after puberty show reduced performance when listening to the second language in background noise, despite normal auditory thresholds. However, past studies have not controlled for the homogeneity of the bilingual participants used in auditory research; therefore, it is unknown whether the deficit observed in bilingual function is due to a lack of control for language-related variables. The ability of a homogeneous group of Spanish-English bilinguals and English monolingual listeners to perceive sentences in quiet and in noise at threshold levels was evaluated using the Hearing in Noise Test (HINT). Both groups performed similarly in quiet conditions. In the noise conditions, the bilingual group's performance was significantly poorer than the monolingual group's performance. However, both groups showed a binaural advantage of 7-8 dB when the signal and noise were separated by 90 degrees. <s> BIB017 </s> Non-native speech perception in adverse conditions: A review <s> Listener type <s> Native American English and non-native (Dutch) listeners identified either the consonant or the vowel in all possible American English CV and VC syllables. The syllables were embedded in multispeaker babble at three signal-to-noise ratios (0, 8, and 16 dB). The phoneme identification performance of the non-native listeners was less accurate than that of the native listeners. All listeners were adversely affected by noise. With these isolated syllables, initial segments were harder to identify than final segments. Crucially, the effects of language background and noise did not interact; the performance asymmetry between the native and non-native groups was not significantly different across signal-to-noise ratios. It is concluded that the frequently reported disproportionate difficulty of non-native listening under disadvantageous conditions is not due to a disproportionate increase in phoneme misidentifications. <s> BIB018 </s> Non-native speech perception in adverse conditions: A review <s> Listener type <s> This study examined the effect of presumed mismatches between speech input and the phonological representations of English words by native speakers of English (NE) and Spanish (NS). The English test words, which were produced by a NE speaker and a NS speaker, varied orthogonally in lexical frequency and neighborhood density and were presented to NE listeners and to NS listeners who differed in English pronunciation proficiency. It was hypothesized that mismatches between phonological representations and speech input would impair word recognition, especially for items from dense lexical neighborhoods which are phonologically similar to many other words and require finer sound discrimination. Further, it was assumed that L2 phonological representations would change with L2 proficiency. The results showed the expected mismatch effect only for words from dense neighborhoods. For Spanish-accented stimuli, the NS groups recognized more words from dense neighborhoods than the NE group did. For native-produced st... <s> BIB019 </s> Non-native speech perception in adverse conditions: A review <s> Listener type <s> This study compared monosyllabic word recognition in quiet, noise, and noise with reverberation for 15 monolingual American English speakers and 12 Spanish–English bilinguals who had learned English prior to 6 years of age and spoke English without a noticeable foreign accent. Significantly poorer word recognition scores were obtained for the bilingual listeners than for the monolingual listeners under conditions of noise and noise with reverberation, but not in quiet. Although bilinguals with little or no foreign accent in their second language are often assumed by their peers, or their clinicians in the case of hearing loss, to be identical in perceptual abilities to monolinguals, the present data suggest that they may have greater difficulty in recognizing words in noisy or reverberant listening environments. <s> BIB020 </s> Non-native speech perception in adverse conditions: A review <s> Listener type <s> This experiment assessed the effect of variation in speech rate on comprehension and persuasiveness of a message presented in text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis to native and non-native listeners. Eighty non-native speakers of English and 80 native speakers of Australian English were randomly assigned to listen to eight banking product descriptions under one of four conditions: normal rate (155 words per minute) with no background noise, normal rate with multi-talker background noise (+6dB SNR), fast-normal (178 words per minute) with no background noise, and fast-normal with multi-talker background noise. Participants completed comprehension tests and rated each product's usefulness. A faster rate lowers comprehension for both native and non-native listeners but does not influence the persuasiveness of the message. The findings have implications for the selection of speech rates for persuasive messages delivered to native and non-native listeners using TTS. <s> BIB021 </s> Non-native speech perception in adverse conditions: A review <s> Listener type <s> Previous research has shown that speech recognition differences between native and proficient non-native listeners emerge under suboptimal conditions. Current evidence has suggested that the key deficit that underlies this disproportionate effect of unfavorable listening conditions for non-native listeners is their less effective use of compensatory information at higher levels of processing to recover from information loss at the phoneme identification level. The present study investigated whether this non-native disadvantage could be overcome if enhancements at various levels of processing were presented in combination. Native and non-native listeners were presented with English sentences in which the final word varied in predictability and which were produced in either plain or clear speech. Results showed that, relative to the low-predictability-plain-speech baseline condition, non-native listener final word recognition improved only when both semantic and acoustic enhancements were available (high-predictability-clear-speech). In contrast, the native listeners benefited from each source of enhancement separately and in combination. These results suggests that native and non-native listeners apply similar strategies for speech-in-noise perception: The crucial difference is in the signal clarity required for contextual information to be effective, rather than in an inability of non-native listeners to take advantage of this contextual information per se. <s> BIB022 </s> Non-native speech perception in adverse conditions: A review <s> Listener type <s> Studies comparing native and non-native listener performance on speech perception tasks can distinguish the roles of general auditory and language-independent processes from those involving prior knowledge of a given language. Previous experiments have demonstrated a performance disparity between native and non-native listeners on tasks involving sentence processing in noise. However, the effects of energetic and informational masking have not been explicitly distinguished. Here, English and Spanish listener groups identified keywords in English sentences in quiet and masked by either stationary noise or a competing utterance, conditions known to produce predominantly energetic and informational masking, respectively. In the stationary noise conditions, non-native talkers suffered more from increasing levels of noise for two of the three keywords scored. In the competing talker condition, the performance differential also increased with masker level. A computer model of energetic masking in the competing talker condition ruled out the possibility that the native advantage could be explained wholly by energetic masking. Both groups drew equal benefit from differences in mean F0 between target and masker, suggesting that processes which make use of this cue do not engage language-specific knowledge. <s> BIB023 </s> Non-native speech perception in adverse conditions: A review <s> Listener type <s> Bilinguals are better able to perceive speech-in-noise in their native compared to their non-native language. This benefit is thought to be due to greater use of higher-level, linguistic context in the native language. Previous studies showing this have used sentences and do not allow us to determine which level of language contributes to this context benefit. Here, we used a new paradigm that isolates the semantic level of speech, in both languages of bilinguals. Results revealed that in the native language, a semantically related target word facilitates the perception of a previously presented degraded prime word relative to when a semantically unrelated target follows the prime, suggesting a specific contribution of semantics to the native language context benefit. We also found the reverse in the non-native language, where there was a disadvantage of semantic context on word recognition, suggesting that such top–down, contextual information results in semantic interference in one's second language. <s> BIB024 </s> Non-native speech perception in adverse conditions: A review <s> Listener type <s> In this study, we asked whether native and non-native speakers of English use a similar balance of lexical knowledge and acoustic cues, e.g., juncture-specific allophones, to segment spoken English, and whether the two groups are equally affected by energetic masking (a competing talker) and by cognitive load (a simultaneous visual search task). In intact speech, as well as in both adverse conditions, non-native speakers gave relatively less weight to lexical plausibility than to acoustic cues. Under energetic masking, overall segmentation accuracy decreased, but this decrease was of comparable magnitude in native and non-natives speakers. Under cognitive load, native speakers relied relatively more on lexical plausibility than on acoustic cues. This lexical drift was not observed in the non-native group. These results indicate that non-native speakers pay less attention to lexical information-and relatively more attention to acoustic detail-than previously thought. They also suggest that the penetrability of the speech system by cognitive factors depends on listener's proficiency with the language, and especially their level of lexical-semantic knowledge. <s> BIB025 </s> Non-native speech perception in adverse conditions: A review <s> Listener type <s> The intelligibility of speech in noisy environments depends not only on the functionality of listeners' peripheral auditory systems, but also on cognitive factors such as their language learning experience. Previous studies have shown, for example, that normal-hearing listeners attending to a non-native language have more difficulty identifying speech targets in noisy conditions than do native listeners. Furthermore, native listeners have more difficulty understanding speech targets in the presence of speech noise in their native language versus a foreign language. The present study addresses the role of listener language experience with both the target and noise languages by examining second-language sentence recognition in first- and second-language noise. Native English speakers and non-native English speakers whose native language is Mandarin were tested on English sentence recognition in English and Mandarin 2-talker babble. Results show that both listener groups experienced greater difficulty in English versus Mandarin babble, but that native Mandarin listeners experienced a smaller release from masking in Mandarin babble relative to English babble. These results indicate that both the similarity between the target and noise and the language experience of the listeners contribute to the amount of interference listeners experience when listening to speech in the presence of speech noise. <s> BIB026 </s> Non-native speech perception in adverse conditions: A review <s> Listener type <s> The goal of the present study was to devise a means of representing languages in a perceptual similarity space based on their overall phonetic similarity. In Experiment 1, native English listeners performed a free classification task in which they grouped 17 diverse languages based on their perceived phonetic similarity. A similarity matrix of the grouping patterns was then submitted to clustering and multidimensional scaling analyses. In Experiment 2, an independent group of native English listeners sorted the group of 17 languages in terms of their distance from English. Experiment 3 repeated Experiment 2 with four groups of non-native English listeners: Dutch, Mandarin, Turkish and Korean listeners. Taken together, the results of these three experiments represent a step towards establishing an approach to assess the overall phonetic similarity of languages. This approach could potentially provide the basis for developing predictions regarding foreign-accented speech intelligibility for various listener groups, and regarding speech perception accuracy in the context of background noise in various languages. <s> BIB027 </s> Non-native speech perception in adverse conditions: A review <s> Listener type <s> This paper shows that the effect of different types of noise on recognition of different phonemes by native versus non-native listeners is highly variable, even within classes of phonemes with the same manner or place of articulation. In a phoneme identification experiment, English and Dutch listeners heard all 24 English consonants in VCV stimuli in quiet and in three types of noise: competing talker, speech-shaped noise, and modulated speech-shaped noise (all with SNRs of -6dB). Differential effects of noise type for English and Dutch listeners were found for eight consonants (/p t k g m n @? r/) but not for the other 16 consonants. For those eight consonants, effects were again highly variable: each noise type hindered non-native listeners more than native listeners for some of the target sounds, but none of the noise types did so for all of the target sounds, not even for phonemes with the same manner or place of articulation. The results imply that the noise types employed will strongly affect the outcomes of any study of native and non-native speech perception in noise. <s> BIB028 </s> Non-native speech perception in adverse conditions: A review <s> Listener type <s> Processing speech in a non-native language requires listeners to cope with influences from their first language and to overcome the effects of limited exposure and experience. These factors may be particularly important when listening in adverse conditions. However, native listeners also suffer in noise, and the intelligibility of speech in noise clearly depends on factors which are independent of a listener's first language. The current study explored the issue of language-independence by comparing the responses of eight listener groups differing in native language when confronted with the task of identifying English intervocalic consonants in three masker backgrounds, viz. stationary speech-shaped noise, temporally-modulated speech-shaped noise and competing English speech. The study analysed the effects of (i) noise type, (ii) speaker, (iii) vowel context, (iv) consonant, (v) phonetic feature classes, (vi) stress position, (vii) gender and (viii) stimulus onset relative to noise onset. A significant degree of similarity in the response to many of these factors was evident across all eight language groups, suggesting that acoustic and auditory considerations play a large role in determining intelligibility. Language-specific influences were observed in the rankings of individual consonants and in the masking effect of competing speech relative to speech-modulated noise. <s> BIB029 </s> Non-native speech perception in adverse conditions: A review <s> Listener type <s> The similarities and contrasts between native and non-native identification of multi-speaker Mandarin tones in quiet and in noise were explored in a perception experiment. Mandarin tone materials produced by three male and three female speakers were presented with five levels of signal-to-noise ratios (quiet, 0, -5, -10, and -15dB) in two presentation formats (blocked by speaker and mixed across speakers) to listeners with various Mandarin experience (native, first-year, second-year, third-year, and fourth-year students). Stimuli blocked by speaker yielded higher accuracy and shorter reaction time. The additional demand of processing mixed-speaker stimuli, however, did not compromise non-native performance more than native performance. Noise expectedly compromised identification performance, although it did not compromise non-native identification more than native identification. Native listeners expectedly outperformed non-native listeners, although identification performance did not vary systematically as a function of duration of Mandarin experience. It is speculated that sources of variability in speech would affect non-native more than native tone identification only if syllable-internal, canonical F0 information is removed or altered. <s> BIB030 </s> Non-native speech perception in adverse conditions: A review <s> Listener type <s> Non-rhotic British English speakers and Germans living in England were compared in their use of short- and long-domain r-resonances (cues to an upcoming [@?]) in read English sentences heard in noise. The sentences comprised 52 pairs differing only in /r/ or /l/ in a minimal-pair target word (mirror, miller). Target words were cross-spliced into a different utterance of the same sentence-base (match) and into a base originally containing the other target word (mismatch), making a four-stimulus set for each sentence-pair. Intelligibility of target and some preceding unspliced words was measured. English listeners were strongly influenced by r-resonances in the sonorant immediately preceding the critical /r/. A median split of the German group showed that those who had lived in southeast England for 3-20 months used the weaker long-domain r-resonances, whereas Germans who had lived in England for 21-105 months ignored all r-resonances, possibly in favour of word frequency. A preliminary study of German speech showed differences in temporal extent and spectral balance (frequency of F3 and higher formants) between English and German r-resonances. The perception and production studies together suggest sophisticated application of exposure-induced changes in acoustic-phonetic and phonological knowledge of L1 to a partially similar sound in L2. <s> BIB031 </s> Non-native speech perception in adverse conditions: A review <s> Listener type <s> The most straightforward way to explain why Danes understand spoken Swedish relatively better than Swedes understand spoken Danish would be that spoken Danish is intrinsically a more difficult language to understand than spoken Swedish. We discuss circumstantial evidence suggesting that Danish is intrinsically poorly intelligible. We then report on a formal experiment in which we tested the intelligibility of Danish and Swedish materials spoken by three representative male speakers per language (isolated cognate and non-cognate words, words in semantically unpredictable sentences, words in spontaneous interaction in map tasks) presented in descending levels of noise to native listeners of Danish (N=18) and Swedish (N=24), respectively. The results show that Danish is as intelligible to Danish listeners as Swedish is to Swedish listeners. In a separate task, the same listeners recognized the same materials (presented without noise) in the neighboring language. The asymmetry that has traditionally been claimed was indeed found, even when differences in familiarity with the non-native language were controlled for. Possible reasons for the asymmetry are discussed. <s> BIB032 </s> Non-native speech perception in adverse conditions: A review <s> Listener type <s> The study connects two major topics in current speech research: foreign accentedness and speech in adverse conditions. We parallel the research in intelligibility of non-native speech, but instead of linguistic unit recognition we focus on the perception of the foreign accent strength. First, the question of type and degree of perceptual deficiencies occurring along with certain types of signal degradation is tackled. Second, we measure correlations between the accent ratings and certain candidate phenomena that may influence them, e.g., articulation rate, temporal patterning, contrasts in sound pressure levels on selected syllables and F0 variation. The impacts of different types of signal degradation help to estimate the role of segmental/suprasegmental information in assessments of foreignness in Czech English. The full appreciation of the strength of foreign accent is apparently not possible without fine phonetic detail on the segmental level. However, certain suprasegmental features of foreignness are robust enough to manifest at severe levels of signal degradation. Pairwise variability indices of vowel durations and variation in F0 tracks seem to guide the listener even better in the degraded than in the 'clean' speech signal. <s> BIB033
For the listener populations in the studies listed in Table 1 , the most frequently reported data are age of arrival (AOA) and length of residence (LOR) in the L2 country. However, there is enough variation across studies that it is difficult to determine whether the target language (TL) of the listeners in a given study should be regarded as a FL or L2. BIB008 establish a cut-off point around puberty to distinguish between early and late bilinguals: early bilinguals had AOAs up to 13 and late bilinguals between 14 and 26. In this case a more strict use of terms would define the groups as bilingual versus L2 learners, respectively, although even some of the learners in the 'early' group might be considered L2 speakers rather than bilingual. Then again, in BIB011 and in BIB009 the (presumably same) sample of subjects were divided into three age of learning groups with the cut-off points at ages 7, 14 and 19, in which case the two older groups are best considered L2 speakers. BIB021 also use an age around puberty (AOA = 15) as a defining criterion for their late-learners. BIB012 refer to L2 speakers for groups of Chinese speakers of English arriving in America after the age of 21. Since in the previous studies, late 'bilingual' groups contained subjects with AOA up to 20 years, it may be the case that for these authors this is the cut-off point between bilinguals and L2 speakers. In general, Flege and his collaborators apply the term bilingual in a literal sense to refer to speakers of L2s, irrespective of their AOA. This literal sense is also adopted by BIB013 , who speak of trilinguals despite the fact that the second and third languages were learned in a formal setting in the L1 country from secondary school. BIB007 provide a clearer separation of listener groups and, at least in 2 out of 3 groups, the term bilingual seems appropriate (bilinguals from infancy and from toddlerhood). However, the group of post-puberty learners, who started learning their L2 ranging from age 14 and with a reported use of the language varying between 3 and 26 year is probably better defined as an L2 group, rather than bilingual. BIB020 follow this approach when selecting their bilingual group in enlisting only speakers of English and Spanish who were exposed to the two languages before the age of six. Thus as noted earlier, comparisons across the groups tested in different studies of non-native speech perception in noise are problematic. Indeed, several authors BIB014 BIB017  advocate a thorough description and control of several speaker variables that introduce heterogeneity in subject sample populations and have been shown to influence linguistic performance. However, in their own work, language proficiency is measured by selfassessment, which is an intrinsically subjective measure and may vary culturally BIB010 . Von BIB017 set out to obtain a homogenous bilingual sample by selecting immigrants to the USA arriving after age 10, a cut off point based on neurological maturation. However, their upper limit (age 20) may introduce heterogeneity since for some authors (e.g. BIB008 the cut off between early and late 'bilinguals' is around puberty. Later teenager immigrants typically do not receive as much school immersion and formal education in the L2, which has been found to be a relevant variable BIB012 . In early studies particularly, NN listeners are described very succinctly. For example,  provide no details concerning the L1, TL competence level or AOA of their 32 NN listeners. The only information provided is that they were 'foreign-born', which suggests their TL was a FL. Similarly,  only indicate that the NN speakers were graduate students in the USA. The listeners in BIB004 had differing L1s, learned English as teenagers and spoke it with a foreign accent. There, a minimum level of performance on the modified rhyme test BIB001 was used a criterion for inclusion. BIB006 pool together listeners who could be considered to be FL speakers with others who could be L2 speakers. Their LOR in the TL country ranged from 1 to 13 years. The earliest AOA was 19, and all of them had studied the TL (English) in their L1 country (Japan) prior to arriving to the TL country. These details suggest that for some but perhaps not all of the 10 listeners, English could be considered a FL, but it is difficult to be certain. However, even in current studies there can be ambiguity. For example, participants in  were university students distributed in four groups according to AOA and previous experience with the TL. However, since LOR is not mentioned, it is unclear whether for some of them the TL was still a FL. BIB025 studied listeners who had learned the TL as a FL in their native country but had since migrated to the TL, where they had been living between 3 and 10 years, which suggests their FL had become a L2. Several studies tested listeners who learned the target language (TL) as an FL in their country of origin, and that was also where testing took place BIB015 BIB013 BIB018 BIB024 ). These are similar to the populations analysed by BIB010 and Bradlow and her collaborators BIB016 BIB026 , being mainly visiting students with a very short LOR, making results more comparable. The main difference is that the latter authors carried out testing in the TL country, so their listeners may have had more native input than the other studies since they were living there, albeit temporarily. In a later study BIB027 the authors have two listener populations tested in the aforementioned conditions (in the TL country where they have resided for under 1 month) and two other listener groups tested in their own NL country where they used the FL on a regular basis. In terms of TL sound identification, as we shall see below, the amount of native input is an important variable. Indeed, BIB016 consider that the initially surprising lack of correlation between 'classic' variables such as AOA or LOR and speech perception in noise is due to the fact that they are dealing with FL listeners with limited experience with the TL. BIB019 use a foreign accent rating test to divide the listeners into high and low proficiency L2 participants. Even more directly, some studies employ performance in quiet conditions as a classification measure for perceptual proficiency BIB004 BIB006  García Lecumberri and Cooke, 2006) . In general, NN population proficiency classifications for perceptual research tend to be carried out less directly. NN competence is often estimated by self-assessment BIB010 BIB013 BIB017  BIB028 BIB025 , which has proved to be unreliable given its intrinsic subjectivity BIB029 and the potential impact of cultural differences BIB010 . Still, in other studies, competence is roughly estimated BIB007 BIB016 BIB018 BIB024 BIB027 . Other authors make use of years of instruction BIB005 BIB018 BIB030 BIB025 , LOR BIB003 BIB009 BIB012 Mackay et al., 2001a,b; BIB031 BIB025 , frequency of use or contact with the TL BIB013 BIB017 BIB020 BIB032 or general proficiency tests BIB016 BIB022 BIB023 BIB027 BIB026 BIB033 . It is known that general competence is often unrelated to phonological competence BIB002  , and in particular precise timing control is a separate skill that non-native speakers often fail to master  ; nonetheless some studies  have found correlations between perception in adverse conditions and non-perceptual measures of competence (such as vocabulary).