title: Relationship between listeners' nonnative speech recognition and categorization abilities.
abstract: Enhancement of the perceptual encoding of talker characteristics (indexical information) in speech can facilitate listeners' recognition of linguistic content. The present study explored this indexical-linguistic relationship in nonnative speech processing by examining listeners' performance on two tasks: nonnative accent categorization and nonnative speech-in-noise recognition. Results indicated substantial variability across listeners in their performance on both the accent categorization and nonnative speech recognition tasks. Moreover, listeners' accent categorization performance correlated with their nonnative speech-in-noise recognition performance. These results suggest that having more robust indexical representations for nonnative accents may allow listeners to more accurately recognize the linguistic content of nonnative speech.
authors.affiliation: Department of Speech and Hearing Sciences, Indiana University, 200 South Jordan Avenue, Bloomington, Indiana 47405 eatagi@brandeis.edu, tbent@indiana.edu.
authors.forename: Eriko
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Atagi
authors.affiliation: Department of Speech and Hearing Sciences, Indiana University, 200 South Jordan Avenue, Bloomington, Indiana 47405 eatagi@brandeis.edu, tbent@indiana.edu.
authors.forename: Tessa
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Bent
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D008297:Male; D019303:Multilingualism; D046709:Pattern Recognition, Physiological / Q000502:physiology; D010470:Perceptual Masking / Q000502:physiology; D010700:Phonetics; D010897:Pitch Discrimination / Q000502:physiology; D013065:Speech Intelligibility / Q000502:physiology*; D013067:Speech Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D055815:Young Adult