The Adaptation to Mandarin-Accented English by Older, Hearing-Impaired Listeners Following Brief Exposure to the Accent

Abstract

Purpose The language processing of Mandarin-accented English (MAE) by older hearing-impaired (OHI), older normally hearing (NH), and younger NH listeners was explored. We examined whether OHI adults have more difficulty than NH listeners in recognizing and adapting to MAE speech productions after receiving brief training with the accent. Method Talker-independent adaptation was evaluated in an exposure training study design. Listeners were trained either by four MAE talkers or four Australian English talkers (control group) before listening to sentences presented by a novel MAE talker. Speech recognition for both the training sentences and the experimental sentences were compared between lis..