Bachelor of Science (BS), Ohio University, 2021, Communication Sciences and Disorders

This study investigated the perception of spectrally-degraded, Mandarin-accented speech in native English listeners. Twenty-four native Mandarin speakers and two native English speakers recorded a reading of the Rainbow passage in English. A sample of this recording was played for 105 Ohio University students who rated the accents on a scale of 1 to 9. Based on this rating task, two speakers with slight accent and two speakers with strong accent were chosen to record both HINT and R-SPIN sentence lists. The R-SPIN sentence lists consisted of HP and LP sentences, which were used to assess the effect of contextual information on speech recognition of native English listeners. Sentences were presented to twenty native English listeners in both the original condition and a 6-channel vocoder processed condition. Results revealed that the combination of accented speech and vocoder processing was detrimental to speech recognition in native English listeners. Additionally, data from R-SPIN sentence lists suggest that the presence of accent limited listeners' ability to utilize contextual information. These adverse effects increased as the degree of accent increased. Results also suggested a possible link between talker sex and recognition performance; recognition accuracies were higher overall for the noise-vocoded, foreign-accented speech produced by female talkers.

Committee: Li Xu (Advisor) Subjects: Communication