Does background noise make the native language compete more when listening to a second language?

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Listeners often recognize spoken words amid background noise. Previous research has shown that noise reduces phoneme intelligibility and hampers spoken-word recognition, especially for non-native listeners.

The researchers investigated how noise affects lexical competition in both the non-native and native language, reflecting how much the two languages are co-activated. They recorded the eye movements of native Dutch participants listening to English sentences containing a target word while viewing displays of four objects. On target-present trials, the display showed the object corresponding to the target word and three unrelated distractors. On target-absent trials, the target object, such as a wizard, was missing. Instead, the display showed an English competitor sharing the beginning sound of the English target, such as window; a Dutch competitor sharing that beginning sound, such as wimpel, meaning pennant; and two unrelated distractors. Half of the sentences were masked by speech-shaped noise, and the other half were presented in quiet.

Compared with quiet, noise delayed fixations on target objects in target-present trials. In target-absent trials, fixation biases toward the English and Dutch onset competitors over the unrelated distractors were more likely in noise than in quiet. The findings indicate that background noise increases lexical competition in both the task-relevant non-native language, English, and the task-irrelevant native language, Dutch. The latter reflects stronger native-language interference during non-native spoken-word recognition under adverse conditions.