Purpose: This study explored clear speech (CS) and noise-adapted speech (NAS) intelligibility benefits for native and nonnative English listeners. It also examined how the two speaking style adaptations interact with maskers that vary from purely energetic to largely informational at different signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs). Method: Materials…

Many studies evidence the flexibility of speech perception in the first language (L1), which allows rapid adaptation to unfamiliar foreign accents. Two influential studies by Bradlow and Bent (2008) and a follow-up study by Baese-Berk et al. (2013) found that increased variability as a function of the number of talkers and accents facilitated the…

Much of speech perception research has focused on brief spectro-temporal properties in the signal, but some studies have shown that adults can recover linguistic form when those properties are absent. In this experiment, 7-year-old English-speaking children demonstrated adultlike abilities to understand speech when only sine waves (SWs)…