How does listener proficiency influence understanding difficult German sounds

Listener proficiency significantly influences the understanding of difficult German sounds. Higher proficiency helps listeners better perceive and distinguish specific German phonemes, even under challenging acoustic conditions such as noise or unfamiliar accents.

Influence of Proficiency on Perception of German Sounds

• Listeners with greater proficiency in German or acoustic experience tend to have improved ability to identify and discriminate difficult German vowel sounds, such as front rounded vowels /y/ and /ø/, which are challenging for non-native speakers due to their rarity in other languages. ^{1, 2}
• Proficiency also affects the perception of subtle phonetic cues. For example, native-like perception of unstressed vowels and final consonants like /t/ deletion depends on listeners’ experience with German phonology. ^{3, 4}
• Studies show that learners with higher proficiency produce more target-like phonological features and display enhanced auditory sensitivity to German sound contrasts. ^{5, 6}

Cognitive and Linguistic Factors

• Listener proficiency interacts with cognitive factors such as attention and explicit linguistic knowledge, enhancing the ability to process non-native sounds. ^{7, 8}
• Proficiency aids listeners in using contextual and acoustic cues effectively to understand speech, especially in noisy environments, which is critical for parsing challenging German sounds. ^{9, 10}

Summary

Listener proficiency in German directly improves the perception, discrimination, and comprehension of difficult German sounds by enhancing sensitivity to phonetic details, enabling better use of acoustic and contextual cues, and supporting more native-like phonological processing. This facilitates understanding even in adverse listening conditions and with complex phonetic contrasts. ^{6, 1, 5, 7}

References

• English Speakers’ Perception of Non-native Vowel Contrasts in Adverse Listening Conditions: A Discrimination Study on the German Front Rounded Vowels /y/ and /ø/

• English Speakers’ Perception of Non-native Vowel Contrasts in Adverse Listening Conditions: A Discrimination Study on the German Front Rounded Vowels /y/ and /ø/

• ‘Grandpa’ or ‘opera’? Production and perception of unstressed /a/ and /əʁ/ in German

• Do listeners recover “deleted” final /t/ in German?

• The bilingual advantage in L3 learning: a developmental study of rhotic sounds

• How experience with tone in the native language affects the L2 acquisition of pitch accents

• THE ROLE OF ACOUSTIC CUES AND LISTENER PROFICIENCY IN THE PERCEPTION OF ACCENT IN NONNATIVE SOUNDS

• The role of explicit knowledge and experience with accent in the acquisition of second language sounds

• Spatial attentional behavior analysis based on cognitive style during speech-in-noise task

• Crosslinguistic Intelligibility of Russian and German Speech in Noisy Environment

• COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF VOWEL SOUND SYSTEMS IN RUSSIAN, GERMAN, CHUVASH AND ENGLISH

• COUPLED VOLUME MULTI-SLOPE ROOM IMPULSE RESPONSES: A QUANTITATIVE ANALYSIS METHOD

• “ Sounds of the ’ Hyperghetto ’ : Sounded Counternarratives in Newark , New Jersey Club Music Production and Performance ”

• How experience with tone in the native language affects the L2 acquisition of pitch accents

• Albert S. Bregman (1936–2023)

• The Effect of Teachers’ Metalanguage on Learners’ Noticing of Iranian EFL Learners across Proficiency Levels

• Inflectional morphology in German hearing-impaired children

• The Role of Acoustic Distance and Sociolinguistic Knowledge in Dialect Identification

• Influence of linguistic properties and hearing impairment on visual speech perception skills in the German language

• Influence of linguistic properties and hearing impairment on visual speech perception skills in the German language

• Development of Podcast Spotify-Based Learning Media in Hörverstehen Course Level A2

• The combined effects of contextual predictability and noise on the acoustic realisation of German syllables.

• Phonological and semantic aspects of German intonation

• A listening advantage for native speech is reflected by attention-related activity in auditory cortex

• Auditory Perceptual Abilities Are Associated with Specific Auditory Experience

• The processing and comprehension of wh-questions among second language speakers of German