... Foreign Speech Perception
Holger Mitterer, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, The Netherlands
James M. McQueen, Behavioural Science Institute and Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition & Behaviour, Centre for Cognition, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen, The Netherlands
Abstract:
Understanding foreign speech is difficult, in part because of unusual mappings between sounds and words. It is known that listeners in their native language can use lexical knowledge (about how words ought to sound) to learn how to interpret unusual speech-sounds. We therefore investigated whether subtitles, which provide lexical information, support perceptual learning about foreign speech. Dutch participants, unfamiliar with Scottish and Australian regional accents of English, watched Scottish or Australian English videos with Dutch, English or no subtitles, and then repeated audio fragments of both accents. Repetition of novel fragments was worse after Dutch-subtitle exposure but better after English-subtitle exposure. Native-language subtitles appear to create lexical interference, but foreign-language subtitles assist speech learning by indicating which words (and hence sounds) are being spoken.
Citation: Mitterer H, McQueen JM (2009) Foreign Subtitles Help
but Native-Language Subtitles Harm Foreign Speech Perception. PLoS ONE
4(11): e7785. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0007785
Editor: Denis G. Pelli, New York University, United States of
America Received March 17, 2009; Accepted October 7, 2009; Published
November 11, 2009
Copyright: ß 2009 Mitterer, McQueen. This is an open-access
article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution
License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction
in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Funding: This work was funded by the Max-Planck-Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Wissenschaften (www.mpg.de). The funders had no role in
study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or
preparation of the manuscript.
Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
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