Interpretation of prosodically marked focus in cochlear implant-simulated speech by non-native listeners

This study assesses how a cochlear implant (CI) simulation influences the interpretation of prosodically marked linguistic focus in a non-native language. In an online experiment, two groups of normal-hearing native Dutch learners of English of different ages (12–14 year-old adolescents vs. 18 + year-old adults) and with different proficiency levels in English (A2 vs. B2/C1) were asked to listen to CI-simulated and non-CI-simulated English sentences differing in prosodically marked focus and indicate which of four possible context questions the speaker answered. Results show that, as expected, focus interpretation is significantly less accurate in the CI-simulated condition compared to the non-CI-simulated condition and that more proficient non-native listeners outperform less proficient non-native listeners. However, there was no interaction between the influence of the spectro-temporal degradation of the CI-simulated speech signal and that of the English proficiency level of the non-native listeners, suggesting that less proficient nonnative listeners are not more strongly affected by the spectro-temporal degradation of an electric speech signal than more proficient non-native listeners.