Effect of language experience on the intelligibility of interrupted speech

Signal distortions are more detrimental to speech perception by native than non-native listeners. We investigated how speech clarity and semantic context influence the perception of interrupted speech. Native and non-native American English listeners heard semantically meaningful or anomalous sentences produced as conversational or “clear” speech, gated at different rates (0.5–16 Hz). Results showed that both semantic context and speech clarity had a significant rate-dependent impact on the intelligibility of interrupted speech. In general, intelligibility was higher for native than non-native listeners. However, the magnitude of the clear-speech benefit varied across the two listener groups. The clear-speech benefit was obtained for gating rates of 2 Hz and above, except for meaningful sentences with native listeners where the benefit begin at 1 Hz. Both listener groups were able to use contextual information but native listeners derived more benefit at lower gating rates, indicating greater ability to a...