Prosodic prominence conveys key information in speech and is marked by acoustic cues like F0 contour, intensity, and duration across languages. This study investigated how bilingualism and background noise affected prominence perception, focusing on the relative weighting of F0 and intensity cues. Two listener groups, American English native (EN) and Mandarin Chinese L1–English L2 bilingual (CN) listeners, were tested using a two-alternative forced-choice task in prominence identification with digit pairs as speech stimuli. F0 contours varied in seven steps from initial to final prominence, and intensity differences were set at + 5, 0, or −5 dB. Speech stimuli were presented in quiet or six-talker babble. Logistic functions were computed to fit the prominence identification function in which boundary and slope were obtained. Results showed that EN listeners relied more on intensity cues in English than CN listeners. CN listeners displayed a perceptual shift from relying solely on F0 in Mandarin to incorporating intensity in English. Background noise led to shallower slopes in English for both groups, indicating reduced cue sensitivity, but had no such effect on CN listeners hearing Mandarin. These findings highlight how language experience and listening conditions shape cue weighting in prosodic prominence perception.
Chen et al. (Wed,) studied this question.