Language
Does second-language skill help you hear speech in noise?
Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC
Swedish adults with better English understood English sentences in noisy, talker-filled backgrounds much better, while their English level made no difference for Swedish sentences.
Study at a glance
- Design
- Human experiment — Within-subject speech-in-noise test: target language (Swedish, English) x four maskers (stationary noise, fluctuating noise, Swedish babble, English babble), plus proficiency, reading span and Raven measures.
- N
- N=23 · 23 native Swedish adults; for a follow-up analysis they were split at the median English score into low and high proficiency subgroups, excluding those exactly at the median.
- Population
- Normal-hearing native Swedish adults aged 28-64 recruited from workplaces, with English as a second language.
- Outcome
- Speech reception threshold (the signal-to-noise ratio needed to repeat half of sentences correctly).
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Key findings
Everyone needed a quieter background to understand English than Swedish, and competing talkers interfered more than noise. People with higher English proficiency had better thresholds for English sentences but not for Swedish ones, a strong language-by-proficiency interaction. Raven's non-verbal reasoning was unrelated to any threshold, and working memory measured in English related to English thresholds, which the authors attribute mainly to English skill rather than memory capacity.
Methodology
Twenty-three native Swedish adults with normal hearing repeated everyday sentences in Swedish and in English while hearing one of four background sounds: steady noise, fluctuating noise, or two people talking in Swedish or in English. The noise level was adjusted adaptively to find the level at which each person got half the sentences right. Participants also took a standardised English comprehension test, a reading span test of working memory in both languages, and Raven's matrices.
Limitations
The sample was small and many correlations were computed, so the authors themselves urge caution; one unexpected correlation was driven by a single listener. Proficiency was measured, not manipulated, so it may stand in for related factors such as how often people use English, and it was linked with age. The results come from one group of Swedish speakers with English as their second language, and they do not settle whether working memory matters for non-native listening, since the study may have been too small to detect it.
How this study connects
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