Effects of low-pass filtering and visual cue availability on English consonant-in-noise recognition for late bilinguals and monolinguals

Late bilingual listeners are typically more susceptible to noise when listening to speech in their second language than monolinguals, particularly with auditory-only input. Limited research has examined how auditory-only and visual cue availability influences second-language speech-in-noise recognition. This project examines whether low-pass filtering of auditory cues results in greater performance decrements for late Spanish/English bilinguals compared to English monolinguals, given their differing susceptibility to background noise, and how visual cue availability moderates this effect. Additionally, we investigate the extent to which late bilinguals and monolinguals benefit from audiovisual cue availability at different points on the psychometric function during English consonant recognition in noise. To address these questions, we focus on the effect of face masks, which both low-pass filter speech and occlude visual cues, offering an ecologically valid approach to examine these effects. We assess English consonant recognition in open syllables, such as “key,” “she,” and “me,” in speech-shaped noise presented at four signal-to-noise ratios. Participants are tested under two acoustic filtering conditions (all-pass filter and low-pass filter) and two modality conditions (auditory-only and audiovisual). Findings and their implications will be discussed.