The Interlanguage Speech Intelligibility Benefit Disappears Under Noisy Conditions

We investigate the influence of language familiarity on speaker identification in noisy conditions, measured by an adapted version of the Speech Perception in Noise (SPIN) test, with special attention for the differences between English native listeners (L1) and non-native listeners (L2) whose native languages are Chinese and French. We find that for speaker identification in noisy conditions there is no interlanguage speech intelligibility benefit, according to which non-native listeners are better able to comprehend an L2 speaker than a native speaker.