Effect of prior exposure on the perception of Japanese vowel length contrast in reverberation for nonnative listeners

While reverberation often degrades speech intelligibility, previous studies have shown that prior exposure to reverberation can reduce its adverse effects on speech perception. The current study investigated the effect of prior exposure to reverberation on the perception of nonnative speech sounds. We compared the results from two experiments, one in “blocked presentation” where the target words with the same amount of reverberation were presented to participants consistently, and another in “random presentation” where the amount of reverberation added to the target words changed between each trial. A Japanese minimal pair,/ie/ ‘house’ -/iie/ ‘no’, where vowel length creates a phonemic difference, was used as the target. The results for native listeners showed that their responses did not differ significantly between the blocked and random presentations. On the other hand, the effect of presentation type was significant in terms of the responses from the nonnative listeners. The results showed that nonnative listeners did not respond differently between the anechoic and reverberant conditions in the blocked presentation. However, there was a significant difference between the anechoic and reverberant conditions in the random presentation. The results from the nonnative listeners suggest that they try to obtain information of reverberation from the exposure since they could not use top-down processing effectively as much as native listeners. •We examined the effect of prior exposure to reverberation on speech perception.•We compared the results between native and nonnative Japanese listeners.•Performance for native listeners did not differ regardless of the prior exposure.•Performance for nonnative listeners (NNL) showed the effect of the prior exposure.•NNL may need to compensate their perception with information from the exposure.