Garcia Lecumberri, M.L., Cooke, M., Cutugno, F., Giurgiu, M., Meyer, B.T., Scharenborg, O., van Dommelen, W. & Volin, J. (2008) The non-native consonant challenge for European languages. Proceedings of Interspeech, Brisbane, Australia, 1781-1784.
This paper reports on a multilingual investigation into the effects of different masker types on native and non-native perception in a VCV consonant recognition task. Native listeners outperformed 7 other language groups, but all groups
showed a similar ranking of maskers. Strong first language (L1) interference was observed, both from the sound system
and from the L1 orthography. Universal acoustic-perceptual tendencies are also at work in both native and non-native
sound identifications in noise. The effect of linguistic distance, however, was less clear: in large multilingual studies, listener variables may overpower other factors.
