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Category: Project

Description: Abstract: Cocktail party environments require listeners to tune in to a target voice while ignoring surrounding speakers (maskers), which could present unique challenges for bilingual listeners. Our study recruited English-French bilinguals to listen to a male target speaking French or English, masked by two female voices speaking French, English, or Tamil, or by speech-shaped noise. Listeners performed better with L1 than L2 targets, and relative L1/L2 proficiency acted like a categorical rather than a continuous variable with respect to SRT averaged over maskers. Further, listeners struggled the most with L1 maskers and struggled the least with Tamil maskers. The results suggest that the balanced bilinguals have a slight disadvantage with L1 targets but compensate with a larger advantage with L2 targets, compared to unbalanced bilinguals. This positive net result supports the idea that being a balanced bilingual is helpful in speech-on-speech perception tasks in environments that offer substantial exposure to L2.