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English consonant confusions by Greek listeners in quiet and noise and the role of phonological short-term memory

Lengeris, Angelos and Nicolaidis, Katerina (2014) English consonant confusions by Greek listeners in quiet and noise and the role of phonological short-term memory. In: 15th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (INTERSPEECH 2014): Celebrating the Diversity of Spoken Languages. International Speech Communication Association, Singapore, pp. 534-538. ISBN 978-1-63439-435-2. (The full text of this publication is not currently available from this repository. You may be able to access a copy if URLs are provided) (KAR id:62029)

The full text of this publication is not currently available from this repository. You may be able to access a copy if URLs are provided.

Abstract

This study investigated English consonant identification by Greek listeners and the role of phonological short-term memory (PSTM) in listeners’ identification ability. Twenty Greek university students who had received formal instruction in English identified 24 English consonants (embedded in VCV syllables) presented in quiet and in two noise types, a competing talker at a signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of -6dB and an 8-speaker babble at an SNR of -2dB. Participants’ PSTM was assessed via a serial non-word recognition task in Greek. The results showed that identification scores in quiet were significantly higher than in noise. There was no difference in scores between the two noise conditions. PSTM correlated with English consonant identification in quiet and in the two types of noise; listeners with greater PSTM capacity were also better in identifying English consonants in quiet and noise, a finding that extends previous research in quiet to L2 perception in adverse listening conditions. English consonant confusion patterns are interpreted as caused by a combination of first-language interference (at both the phonetic and phonological levels) and spectral/articulatory factors.

Item Type: Book section
Subjects: P Language and Literature > P Philology. Linguistics
Divisions: Divisions > Division of Arts and Humanities > School of Culture and Languages
Depositing User: Angelos Lengeris
Date Deposited: 09 Jun 2017 23:23 UTC
Last Modified: 17 Aug 2022 11:01 UTC
Resource URI: https://kar.kent.ac.uk/id/eprint/62029 (The current URI for this page, for reference purposes)

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