Impact of speaker variability on speech perception in non-native listeners

This study investigates the perception of English words produced by 45 native talkers presented in moderate noise to native Norwegian listeners. The relative intelligibility of individual talkers is compared with that obtained for native listeners in order to determine whether inherent talker clarity is determined by global acoustic-phonetic characteristics. Talker intelligibility was strongly correlated across native and non-native listeners; there was also strong correlation across groups as to the lexical items most often misperceived. Word intelligibility for both was correlated with certain acoustic-phonetic characteristics of the talker’s productions, including amount of energy in the mid-frequency region and mean word duration.