Dislike of Noise? Differences in Language and Culture

What is it about?

Background noise is enemy to effective communication. How much "noise", such as competing speakers in the background, we tolerate varies from person to person. Our research looks into whether this variance has anything to do with one's language background. We included monolingual speakers of American English, Russian-English bilingual speakers, and Spanish-English bilingual speakers and manipulated our test conditions. Our target speech included an English versus Spanish recording of the same content-neutral passage. Our background noise included an English versus Spanish multi-talker babble, each of two versions depending on the number of talkers (4 versus 12). We found significantly less acceptance of noise in Russian-English bilinguals than other listeners, particularly in certain target-babble combinations. The finding suggests possible linguistic/cultural differences in how willingly an individual puts up with noise while trying to following speech of interest.

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Why is it important?

It would be hard to imagine life without communication for human beings. Yet, we live in a noisy world, where communication is degraded in many different ways. Most studies attempt to understand how successful we are in decoding degraded speech, but our study adds a piece to the puzzle how we react to noise from a language and culture point of view.

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