There is ample evidence that both native and non-native listeners deal with speech variation by quickly tuning into a speaker and adjusting their phonetic categories according to the speaker's ambiguous pronunciation. This process is called lexically-guided perceptual learning. Moreover, the presence of noise in the speech signal has previously been shown to change the word competition process by increasing the number of candidate words competing for recognition and slowing down the recognition process. Given that reliable lexical information should be available quickly to induce lexically-guided perceptual learning and that word recognition is slowed down in the presence of noise, and especially so for non-native listeners, the present study investigated whether noise interferes with lexically-guided perceptual learning in native and non-native listening. Native English and Dutch listeners were exposed to a story in English in clean speech or with stretches of noise. All the /l/ and /ɹ/ sounds in the story were replaced with an ambiguous sound half-way between /l/ and /ɹ/. Although noise altered the pattern of responses for the non-native listeners in a subsequent phonetic categorization task, both native and non-native listeners demonstrated lexically-guided perceptual learning in both clean and noisy listening conditions. We argue that the robustness of perceptual learning in the presence of intermittent noise for both native and non-native listeners is additional evidence for the remarkable flexibility of native and non-native perceptual systems even in adverse listening conditions.

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Native listeners benefit from talker familiarity in recognition memory and word identification, especially in adverse listening conditions. The present study addresses the talker familiarity benefit in non-native listening, and the role of listening conditions and listeners’ lexical proficiency in the emergence of this benefit. Dutch non-native listeners of English were trained to identify four English talkers over 4 days. Talker familiarity benefit in recognition memory was investigated using a recognition memory task with “old” and “new” words produced by familiar and unfamiliar talkers presented either in the clear or in noise. Talker familiarity benefit in word identification was investigated by comparing non-native listeners’ performances on the first and the last day in identifying words in different noise levels, produced by either a trained (included in the voice recognition training) or by an untrained talker (not included in the voice recognition training). Non-native listeners demonstrated a talker familiarity benefit in recognition memory, which was modulated by listening conditions and proficiency in the non-native language. No talker familiarity benefit was found in word identification. These results suggest that, similar to native listening, both linguistic and indexical (talker-specific) information influence non-native speech perception. However, this is dependent on the task and type of speech recognition process involved.@en