Cocktail party environments require listeners to tune in to a target voice while ignoring surrounding speakers. This presents unique challenges for bilingual listeners who have familiarity with several languages. Our study recruited English-French bilinguals to listen to a male target speaking French or English, masked by two female voices speaking French, English or Tamil, or by speech-shaped noise, in a fully factorial design. Listeners struggled most with L1 maskers and least with foreign maskers. Critically, this finding held regardless of the target language (L1 or L2) challenging theories about the linguistic component of informational masking, which contrary to our results predicts stronger interference with greater target-to-masker similarity such as L2 vs L2 compared to L2 vs L1. Our findings suggest that the listener’s familiarity with the masker language is an important source of informational masking in multilingual environments.

中文翻译：

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驾驭双语鸡尾酒会：听众的 L1 在信息掩蔽的语言方面的关键作用


鸡尾酒会环境要求听众在忽略周围说话者的同时收听目标语音。这给熟悉多种语言的双语听众带来了独特的挑战。我们的研究招募了英法双语者，在全因子设计中倾听男性目标说法语或英语的声音，被两个说法语、英语或泰米尔语的女性声音掩盖，或者被语音形状的噪音所掩盖。听众对 L1 掩码者的挣扎最大，而对外国掩码者的挣扎最少。至关重要的是，无论目标语言（L1 或 L2）如何，这一发现都对关于信息掩蔽的语言成分的理论提出了挑战，这与我们的结果相反，预测了更大的目标与掩码相似性（例如 L2 与 L2 与 L1）相比，干扰更强。我们的研究结果表明，听者对掩蔽语言的熟悉程度是多语言环境中信息掩蔽的重要来源。