There is ample evidence that both native and non-native listeners deal with speech variation by quickly tuning into a speaker and adjusting their phonetic categories according to the speaker’s ambiguous pronunciation. This process is called lexically-guided perceptual learning. Moreover, the presence of noise in the speech signal has previously been shown to change the word competition process by increasing the number of candidate words competing for recognition and slowing down the recognition process. Given that reliable lexical information should be available quickly to induce lexically-guided perceptual learning and that word recognition is slowed down in the presence of noise, and especially so for non-native listeners, the present study investigated whether noise interferes with lexically-guided perceptual learning in native and non-native listening. Native English and Dutch listeners were exposed to a story in English in clean speech or with stretches of noise. All the /l/ and /ɹ/ sounds in the story were replaced with an ambiguous sound half-way between /l/ and /ɹ/. Although noise altered the pattern of responses for the non-native listeners in a subsequent phonetic categorization task, both native and non-native listeners demonstrated lexically-guided perceptual learning in both clean and noisy listening conditions. We argue that the robustness of perceptual learning in the presence of intermittent noise for both native and non-native listeners is additional evidence for the remarkable flexibility of native and non-native perceptual systems even in adverse listening conditions.

有足够的证据表明，本地和非本地听众都可以通过迅速调入说话者并根据说话者的歧义发音调整其语音类别来应对语音变化。这个过程称为词汇指导的感知学习。此外，先前已显示语音信号中存在噪声会通过增加竞争识别的候选单词的数量并减慢识别过程来改变单词竞争过程。鉴于应该迅速获得可靠的词汇信息以进行词汇指导的感知学习，并且在存在噪音的情况下单词识别的速度会变慢，尤其是对于非本地听众而言，本研究调查了噪声是否干扰母语和非母语听力中的词汇指导的感知学习。母语为英语和荷兰语的听众都以纯净的言语或嘈杂的声音接触了英语故事。故事中的所有/ l /和/ɹ/声音都被替换为/ l /和/ɹ/之间的模糊声音。尽管噪声在随后的语音分类任务中改变了非本地听众的响应方式，但本地和非本地听众都在干净和嘈杂的聆听条件下均表现出了词汇指导的感知学习。