Spoken communication in a non-native language is especially difficult in the presence of noise. This study compared English and Spanish listeners' perceptions of English intervocalic consonants as a function of masker type. Three maskers (stationary noise, multitalker babble, and competing speech) provided varying amounts of energetic and informational masking. Competing English and Spanish speech maskers were used to examine the effect of masker language. Non-native performance fell short of that of native listeners in quiet, but a larger performance differential was found for all masking conditions. Both groups performed better in competing speech than in stationary noise, and both suffered most in babble. Since babble is a less effective energetic masker than stationary noise, these results suggest that non-native listeners are more adversely affected by both energetic and informational masking. A strong correlation was found between non-native performance in quiet and degree of deterioration in noise, suggesting that non-native phonetic category learning can be fragile. A small effect of language background was evident: English listeners performed better when the competing speech was Spanish.

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.

This paper aims at describing English learners' views on the acquisition of the phonetic component of English by focusing on their awareness of the difficulty and importance of English pronunciation as well as their beliefs about influential factors in the acquisition of pronunciation and their attitudes towards English accents. It also aims at examining the differences in phonetic awareness, beliefs and attitudes between learners of English with different first languages (Basque and Spanish). All the participants (n=86) were asked to complete several questionnaires, including a background questionnaire and a specific questionnaire on awareness, beliefs and attitudes. The results indicate that pronunciation is a difficult and important skill for all learners. It was also found that learners consider contact with native speakers and ear training as the most influential factors in the acquisition of pronunciation and that the difficulty of some English accents is related to learners' attitudes towards these accents. The results also indicate that all learners tend to share the same awareness of difficulty, importance of, beliefs about and attitudes towards different accents independently of their first language.

A perception experiment required Spanish learners of English (NNLs) and native English listeners (NLs) to identify the position and relative prominence of stresses in polysyllabic English words and compounds. The results indicated that both groups recognized stress shift and lack of shift very accurately. The NLs showed a stronger tendency to perceive prominence shift in simple words than NNLs, who were more likely to hear simple words as containing one stress. For compounds, differences between listener groups were not significant. It was concluded that, in these experimental tasks, native competence did not provide a strong advantage for stress identification. This result may be partly due to differences in metalinguistic awareness between the English and Spanish participants.

This paper examines, within the framework of Flege’s speech learning model (SLM), the relevance of two factors – age and native language – for the acquisition align of vowel perception abilities by young Spanish learners of English in a formal instructional environment. Findings indicate that age did influence the participants’ ability to identify English vowels, but not in the expected direction and only for those vowels considered to be identical. Thus, the results do not provide evidence of the influence of the critical period for classroom learning, but they do support the SLM’s proposal concerning the influence of type of interlingual identification: that new and identical vowels will be easier than similar vowels.