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In collaboration with the American College of Veterinary Pathologists.

Background: Older adults with hearing loss often report difficulty understanding British-accented speech, such as in television or movies, after having understood such speech in the past. A few studies have examined the intelligibility of various United States regional and non-U.S. varieties of English for American listeners, but only for young adults with normal hearing., Purpose: This preliminary study sought to determine whether British-accented sentences were less intelligible than American-accented sentences for American younger and older adults with normal hearing and for older adults with hearing loss., Research Design: A mixed-effects design, with talker accent and listening condition as within-subjects factors and listener group as a between-subjects factor., Study Sample: Three listener groups consisting of 16 young adults with normal hearing, 15 older adults with essentially normal hearing, and 22 older adults with sloping sensorineural hearing loss., Data Collection and Analysis: Sentences produced by one General American English speaker and one British English speaker were presented to listeners at 70 dB sound pressure level in quiet and in babble. Signal-to-noise ratios for the latter varied among the listener groups. Responses were typed into a textbox and saved on each trial. Effects of accent, listening condition, and listener group were assessed using linear mixed-effects models., Results: American- and British-accented sentences were equally intelligible in quiet, but intelligibility in noise was lower for British-accented sentences than American-accented sentences. These intelligibility differences were similar for all three groups., Conclusion: British-accented sentences were less intelligible than those produced by an American talker, but only in noise., Competing Interests: None., (American Academy of Audiology. This article is published by Thieme.)

This study explored how across-talker differences influence non-native vowel perception. American English (AE) and Korean listeners were presented with recordings of 10 AE vowels in /bVd/ context. The stimuli were mixed with noise and presented for identification in a 10-alternative forced-choice task. The two listener groups heard recordings of the vowels produced by 10 talkers at three signal-to-noise ratios. Overall the AE listeners identified the vowels 22% more accurately than the Korean listeners. There was a wide range of identification accuracy scores across talkers for both AE and Korean listeners. At each signal-to-noise ratio, the across-talker intelligibility scores were highly correlated for AE and Korean listeners. Acoustic analysis was conducted for 2 vowel pairs that exhibited variable accuracy across talkers for Korean listeners but high identification accuracy for AE listeners. Results demonstrated that Korean listeners' error patterns for these four vowels were strongly influenced by variability in vowel production that was within the normal range for AE talkers. These results suggest that non-native listeners are strongly influenced by across-talker variability perhaps because of the difficulty they have forming native-like vowel categories.