Identification of English voiceless fricatives in multispeaker babble noise by native Japanese and English listeners: Influence of English proficiency

Listening to speech in noisy environments is more difficult than in quiet environments, especially for non-native listeners, even if their performance in quiet environments does not fall far below that of native listeners. The results showed that the bilinguals performance in adverse listening environments fell short of that of the native listeners with significant differences, even though the bilinguals attained perfect scores in a quiet environment. The bilingual participants were first exposed to Spanish from birth, and then to English before the age of six. This implies that even early bilinguals do not perform as well as native listeners in adverse environments and are likely to be influenced the language they were first exposed to. The use of background noise with various SNRs will also enable us to understand the mechanism of speech perception by learners with different proficiencies.