Saudi Cultural Missions Theses & Dissertations
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Item Restricted Impact of Adverse Listening Conditions on Non-Native SpeechNOURAH ABDULRAHMAN ALNEAIM; , Hazan, V. L., TuomainenPurpose: Despite the vast literature on how speakers adapt the way that they speak to remain intelligible in the presence of background noise, most studies did not examine speech at a conversational level. Furthermore, most of the earlier studies assessed participants in tasks without communicative intent, e.g. reading sentences or retelling a story. Nevertheless, studies have shown that proficient non-natives are able to match natives in quiet, but have more difficulty in adverse listening conditions. Therefore, our study examined the differences in conversational speech adaptation, between natives English (N=20) and proficient non-natives Arabic/English speakers (N=20), when asked to solve a problem with a communication partner. Method: Diapix ‘spot-the-difference’ task was used to elicit conversations from pairs of speakers. Communication efficiency, listening effort, speaking effort, attention and acoustic-phonetic features of speech were compared in 4 different listening conditions. Listening conditions included quiet, two levels of informational masking (related or unrelated speech to the target), and speech shaped noise. Results: Results revealed that natives were more efficient communicators, with better attention in NORM, and reduced listening effort when compared to non-natives. Interestingly, changes in the acoustic characteristics of speech in adverse conditions were more impacted by condition rather than group. Also, no differences were found in speaking effort or F0 median in both groups. Conclusion: Even though proficient non-natives matched native speakers in acoustics adaptation, they still had more difficulty completing the task and were overall less efficient communicators.2 0