Research Article Prosodic Focus Interpretation in Spectrotemporally Degraded Speech by Non-Native Listeners

Purpose: This study assesses how spectrotemporal degradations that can occur in the sound transmission of a cochlear implant (CI) may influence the ability of non-native listeners to recognize the intended meaning of utterances based on the position of the prosodically focused word. Previous research sug-gests that perceptual accuracy and listening effort are negatively affected by CI processing (or CI simulations) or when the speech is presented in a non-native language, in a number of tasks and circumstances. How these two factors inter-act to affect prosodic focus interpretation, however, remains unclear.Method: In an online experiment, normal-hearing (NH) adolescent and adult native Dutch learners of English and a small control group of NH native English adolescents listened to CI-simulated (eight-channel noise-band vocoded) and non-CI-simulated English sentences differing in prosodically marked focus. For assessing perceptual accuracy, listeners had to indicate which of four possible context questions the speaker answered. For assessing listening effort, a dual -task paradigm was used with a secondary free recall task.Results: The results indicated that prosodic focus interpretation was significantly less accurate in the CI-simulated condition compared with the non-CI-simulated condition but that listening effort was not increased. Moreover, there was no interaction between the influence of the degraded CI-simulated speech signal and listening groups in either their perceptual accuracy or listening effort.Conclusion: Non-native listeners are not more strongly affected by spectrotemporal degradations than native listeners, and less proficient non-native listeners are not more strongly affected by these degradations than more proficient non-native listeners.