The effect of hyperarticulation on speech comprehension under adverse listening conditions

Comprehension assesses a listener’s ability to construe the meaning of an acoustic signal in order to be able to answer questions about its contents, while intelligibility indicates the extent to which a listener can precisely retrieve the acoustic signal. Previous comprehension studies asking listeners for sentence-level information or narrative-level information used native listeners as participants. This is the first study to look at whether clear speech properties (e.g. expanded vowel space) produce a clear speech benefit at the word level for L2 learners for speech produced in naturalistic settings. This study explored whether hyperarticulated speech was more comprehensible than non-hyperarticulated speech for both L1 British English speakers and early and late L2 British English learners in quiet and in noise. Sixteen British English listeners, 16 native Mandarin Chinese listeners as early learners of L2 and 16 native Mandarin Chinese listeners as late learners of L2 rated hyperarticulated samples versus non-hyperarticulated samples in form of words for comprehension under four listening conditions of varying white noise level (quiet or SNR levels of + 16 dB, + 12 dB or + 8 dB) (3 × 2× 4 mixed design). Mean ratings showed all three groups found hyperarticulated speech samples easier to understand than non-hyperarticulated speech at all listening conditions. Results are discussed in terms of other findings (Uther et al., 2012) that suggest that hyperarticulation may generally improve speech processing for all language groups.