title: Nonnative English speaker performance on the Basic English Lexicon (BEL) sentences.
abstract: OBJECTIVE
  The purpose of this study was to examine sentence-recognition performance for a large, diverse group of nonnative speakers of English on the recently developed Basic English Lexicon (BEL) sentence materials and to determine whether BEL sentence lists are equated in difficulty for this population.
  
  
  METHODS
  The BEL sentences were presented to 102 nonnative speakers of English with normal hearing and varied linguistic and cultural backgrounds. Five hundred sentences were presented mixed with noise spectrally matched to the target sentences. Subjects completed an online questionnaire providing detailed demographic and linguistic information. Listeners' spoken English proficiency was also assessed using the Versant English Test (Pearson Education, 2010).
  
  
  RESULTS
  Nonnative listeners showed equal word-recognition performance for 3 groups of BEL sentence lists, each group containing sentence lists that had equivalent difficulty. In addition, spoken language proficiency and several demographic and linguistic factors were significantly correlated with BEL performance.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  The BEL sentence materials have been tested on a large cohort of nonnative speakers of English and have been found to be appropriate for use in speech-perception testing with this population.
authors.affiliation: Queens College of the City University of New York, Flushing, NY, USA.
authors.forename: Stacey
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Rimikis
authors.forename: Rajka
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Smiljanic
authors.forename: Lauren
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Calandruccio
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D018864:Cultural Diversity; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007807:Language Tests; D008037:Linguistics; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D019303:Multilingualism; D013063:Speech Discrimination Tests; D013067:Speech Perception; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires; D014825:Vocabulary; D055815:Young Adult