Given the ubiquity of noisy environments and increasing globalization, the necessity to perceive speech in noise in a non-native language is common and necessary for successful communication. In the current investigation, bilingual individuals who learned their non-native language at different ages underwent magnetic resonance imaging while listening to sentences in both of their languages, in quiet and in noise. Sentence context was varied such that the final word could be of high or low predictability. Results show that early non-native language learning is associated with superior ability to benefit from contextual information behaviourally, and a pattern of neural recruitment in the left inferior frontal gyrus that suggests easier processing when perceiving non-native speech in noise. These findings have implications for our understanding of speech processing in non-optimal listening conditions and shed light on how individuals navigate every day complex communicative environments, in a native and non-native language.

中文翻译：

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语言学习经验和掌握在噪音中感知语音的挑战

鉴于嘈杂环境的普遍存在和日益全球化，以非母语在噪音中感知语音的必要性是成功交流的普遍和必要条件。在目前的调查中，在不同年龄学习非母语的双语个体在安静和嘈杂的环境中听两种语言的句子时接受了磁共振成像。句子上下文是多种多样的，因此最终单词的可预测性可能高或低。结果表明，早期的非母语学习与从行为上的上下文信息中受益的卓越能力有关，并且左额下回的神经募集模式表明在噪音中感知非母语语音时更容易处理。