Julia F Strand, Violet A Brown, Katrina Sewell, Yuxin Lin, Emmett Lefkowitz, Caroline G Saksena
{"title":"Assessing the effects of \"native speaker\" status on classic findings in speech research.","authors":"Julia F Strand, Violet A Brown, Katrina Sewell, Yuxin Lin, Emmett Lefkowitz, Caroline G Saksena","doi":"10.1037/xge0001640","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>It is common practice in speech research to only sample participants who self-report being \"native English speakers.\" Although there is research on differences in language processing between native and nonnative listeners (see Lecumberri et al., 2010, for a review), the majority of speech research that aims to establish general findings (e.g., testing models of spoken word recognition) only includes native speakers in their sample. Not only is the \"native English speaker\" criterion poorly defined, but it also excludes historically underrepresented groups from speech perception research, often without attention to whether this exclusion is likely to affect study outcomes. The purpose of this study is to empirically test whether and how using different inclusion criteria (\"native English speakers\" vs. \"nonnative English speakers\") affects several well-known phenomena in speech perception research. Five hundred participants completed word (<i>N</i> = 200) and sentence (N = 300) identification tasks in quiet and in moderate levels of background noise. Results indicate that multiple classic findings in speech perception research-including the effects of noise level, lexical density, and semantic context on speech intelligibility-persist regardless of \"native English\" speaking status. However, the magnitude of some of these effects differed across participant groups. Taken together, these results suggest that researchers should carefully consider whether native speaker status is likely to affect outcomes and make decisions about inclusion criteria on a study-by-study basis. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).</p>","PeriodicalId":15698,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Experimental Psychology: General","volume":" ","pages":"3027-3041"},"PeriodicalIF":3.7000,"publicationDate":"2024-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11620953/pdf/","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Journal of Experimental Psychology: General","FirstCategoryId":"102","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0001640","RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"2024/9/19 0:00:00","PubModel":"Epub","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"PSYCHOLOGY, EXPERIMENTAL","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
It is common practice in speech research to only sample participants who self-report being "native English speakers." Although there is research on differences in language processing between native and nonnative listeners (see Lecumberri et al., 2010, for a review), the majority of speech research that aims to establish general findings (e.g., testing models of spoken word recognition) only includes native speakers in their sample. Not only is the "native English speaker" criterion poorly defined, but it also excludes historically underrepresented groups from speech perception research, often without attention to whether this exclusion is likely to affect study outcomes. The purpose of this study is to empirically test whether and how using different inclusion criteria ("native English speakers" vs. "nonnative English speakers") affects several well-known phenomena in speech perception research. Five hundred participants completed word (N = 200) and sentence (N = 300) identification tasks in quiet and in moderate levels of background noise. Results indicate that multiple classic findings in speech perception research-including the effects of noise level, lexical density, and semantic context on speech intelligibility-persist regardless of "native English" speaking status. However, the magnitude of some of these effects differed across participant groups. Taken together, these results suggest that researchers should carefully consider whether native speaker status is likely to affect outcomes and make decisions about inclusion criteria on a study-by-study basis. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).
期刊介绍:
The Journal of Experimental Psychology: General publishes articles describing empirical work that bridges the traditional interests of two or more communities of psychology. The work may touch on issues dealt with in JEP: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, JEP: Human Perception and Performance, JEP: Animal Behavior Processes, or JEP: Applied, but may also concern issues in other subdisciplines of psychology, including social processes, developmental processes, psychopathology, neuroscience, or computational modeling. Articles in JEP: General may be longer than the usual journal publication if necessary, but shorter articles that bridge subdisciplines will also be considered.