Receptive vocabulary predicts multilinguals' recognition skills in adverse listening conditions

Abstract

Adverse listening conditions are known to affect bilingual listeners' intelligibility scores more than those of monolingual listeners. To advance theoretical understanding of the mechanisms underpinning bilinguals' challenges in adverse listening conditions, vocabulary size and language entropy are compared as predictors in a sentence transcription task with a heterogeneous multilingual population representative of a speech community. Adverse listening was induced through noise type, bandwidth manipulations, and sentences varying in their semantic predictability. Overall, the results generally confirm anticipated patterns with respect to sentence type, noise masking, and bandwidth. Listeners show better comprehension of semantically coherent utterances without masking and with a full spectrum. Crucially, listeners with larger receptive vocabularies and lower language entropy, a measure of the predictability of one's language use, showed improved performance in adverse listening conditions. Vocabulary size had a substantially larger effect size, indicating that vocabulary size has more impact on performance in adverse listening conditions than bilingual language use. These results suggest that the mechanism behind the bilingual disadvantage in adverse listening conditions may be rooted in bilinguals' smaller language-specific receptive vocabularies, offering a harmonious explanation for challenges in adverse listening conditions experienced by monolinguals and multilinguals.

Current age and language use impact speech-in-noise differently for monolingual and bilingual adults

“…Given these facts paired with our definition of late bilingual as learning English after age 12, it is safe to assume that among the late bilinguals in our study, older SMs had been speaking English for longer than younger SMs at the time of testing. More experience using English would give older late bilinguals an advantage over their younger peers, perhaps through increased English receptive vocabulary size, which has recently been shown to predict the transcription accuracy of English words presented in noise in a diverse group of bilinguals (Suite et al, 2023). SNR also interacted with age and with listener group.…”

“…In two studies involving Italian-English bilingual adults, English SiN perception was found to be less accurate for bilinguals who used relatively more Italian (and therefore relatively less English) at the time of testing (MacKay et al, 2001;Meador et al, 2000). In another study involving a community sample of bilingual adults, speech recognition accuracy in a variety of degraded conditions decreased with increasing language entropy (Suite et al, 2023), which is a metric derived from self-reported language use that quantifies the proportion of time a bilingual uses different languages in a given context (Gullifer & Titone, 2020). In other studies, the relationship between language use and SiN recognition was not significant after the influence of other factors such as English AoA and proficiency were accounted for (Oyama, 1978;Shi, 2012;Shi & Sánchez, 2010).…”

“…The magnitude of the bilingual SiN disadvantage may be modulated by stimulus characteristics, such as the presence of semantic or syntactic context cues, which monolinguals can better leverage to overcome acoustic degradations (Lucks Mendel & Widner, 2016;Skoe & Karayanidi, 2019), and the presence of additional acoustic degradations such as time compression and reverberation, which may exacerbate bilingual difficulties (Phillips et al, 2024;Rogers et al, 2006). In addition, there is extensive evidence that many individual factors influence the magnitude or even the presence of this effect, such as the age when acquisition of the target language began (Regalado et al, 2019;Shi, 2009;Shi & Sánchez, 2010), language proficiency (Kilman et al, 2014;Rimikis et al, 2013) and relative dominance (Cowan et al, 2023;Regalado et al, 2019;Shi & Sánchez, 2010), degree of foreign accent (Shi, 2012), cumulative exposure (Shi, 2009), and current language use patterns (Suite et al, 2023).…”

“…Understanding the influence of current target language use on SiN recognition is of interest for its relevance to the hypothesis that bilingual SiN recognition disadvantages can be attributed to weaker phonological and lexical access during comprehension that results from bilinguals using each of their languages less than monolinguals (Schmidtke, 2016;Skoe & Karayanidi, 2019;Suite et al, 2023).…”