Intelligibility and listening effort for native and non-native French

Native and non-native listeners can identify words in semantically anomalous sentences more accurately when produced clearly by native and non-native speakers (Jung & Dmitrieva, 2023). The present study examines intelligibility and listening effort for two types of clear speech: General and Competitor. Stimuli for this experiment consist of productions from an experiment in which native and non-native French speakers interacted with a faux computer program that ‘guessed’ what they said with controlled responses (Maniwa et al., 2009). When wrong, participants reproduced the words more clearly. When the program’s response was “???” (What did you say?), clear productions were coded as General. When the program’s response was a competitor (e.g., target: reine [ʁɛn], response: reins [ʁɛ∼ ]; target: beurre[bœʁ], response: peur [pœʁ]; target: dit [di], response: du [dy]), clear productions were coded as Competitor. In this perception experiment, participants are tasked with a 2AFC Identification-in-Noise task and an AX Discrimination-in-Noise task. Participants’ accuracy will reflect intelligibility. Competitor tokens are expected to show the greatest intelligibility benefit. Participants’ reaction times will reflect listening effort. While native clear speech is expected to require less listening effort, non-native clear speech may require more due to different clear-speech strategies employed. [Work supported by NSF Grant 2416141.]