Context effects on the auditory perception of English by adults whose first language is Korean.
Item
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Title
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Context effects on the auditory perception of English by adults whose first language is Korean.
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Identifier
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AAI9969706
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identifier
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9969706
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Creator
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Levine, Marion.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Arthur Boothroyd
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Date
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2000
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Language, Linguistics | Speech Communication | Health Sciences, Speech Pathology
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Abstract
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The ability to perceive speech, particularly in degraded listening conditions is a function of receiving the sensory signal and the interpretation of that information. While speech perception by native speakers is highly resistant to vagaries of speaking patterns and linguistic information, noise and reverberation, speech perception by non-native speakers is not. Even highly proficient non-native speakers are much more susceptible to interference than are native speakers.;This study focused on linguistic context. The goals of this study were to measure and compare the effect of several linguistic components of context in quiet and noise, on speech perception by native and non-native American-English speakers.;Subjects were eight native American-English speaking college students and eight college students who spoke Korean as their first language. The Korean subjects had learned English between the ages of 0 and 13 years. There was no history of any hearing problems.;Subjects listened to consonant-vowel-consonant words and nonsense syllables, and three types of sentences: (a) high-probability, i.e., semantically and syntactically appropriate sentences, (b) low-probability, i.e., semantically anomalous but syntactically appropriate sentences, and (c) zero-probability, i.e., semantically and syntactically anomalous sentences (Boothroyd and Nittrouer, 1988). They listened to all stimuli in quiet and at signal-to-noise ratios of 3 and 0 dB. Subjects repeated what they heard and all responses were recorded.;Three native American-English judges listened to these recordings and scored the words, syllables and phonemes as correct or incorrect.;The findings indicate that overall Korean students performed less well than English students did. The difference in performance increased with the addition of noise. The only exception was phoneme recognition in consonant-vowel-consonant nonsense syllables where there was no significant difference between the two group in quiet and in noise. The difference in performance also increased with increasing contextual information with the Koreans performing more poorly.;Both groups took advantage of context, although the English speakers took more advantage. English speakers took advantage of increased plausibility while the Korean spears did not.;Both groups took advantage of word meaning to enhance phoneme recognition in consonant-vowel-consonant words. The two groups also took advantage of dependencies among phonemes when recognizing whole consonant-vowel-consonant words, but the English speakers took greater disadvantage.;Both groups took similar advantage of sentence syntax and word meaning to enhance recognition of consonant-vowel-consonant monosyllables.;Finally, the English talkers treated nonsense consonant-vowel-consonant nonsense syllables as three independent phonemes, while the Korean speakers tended to be negatively affected by the nonsense context.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
