Assessing perceptual performance of non-native English speakers

About 20% of the U.S. population, many of whom are foreign born, speaks a language other than English in the home. Non-native English speakers are known to have difficulty understanding spoken English, especially in noise. For this reason, they are often excluded from psychophysical perceptual experiments. However, the perceptual abilities of these individuals are important to characterize, particularly because solutions to their unique communication difficulties are important to establish. This presentation will review perceptual data from a series of experiments that examined speech recognition in degraded listening conditions and psychophysical performance on basic auditory processing tasks. Listeners in all experiments included young adults with normal hearing whose native language was either English or Spanish. Some of the experiments also included older adults with normal hearing or hearing impairment who learned English as a second language. The results show that non-native speakers of English have considerable difficulty on all complex speech recognition tasks, which is exacerbated with advanced age. Additionally, non-native speakers of English do not perform as well as native speakers of English on some basic psychoacoustic measures. These results have implications for evaluating performance of non-native speakers in the lab and in the clinical setting.