Acceptance of background noise levels in bilingual (Korean-English) listeners.

The acceptable noise level (ANL) is the maximum amount of background noise that listeners are willing to accept while listening to speech. ANL has not been studied in listeners who use languages other than English. The purpose of this study was to explore whether ANLs obtained from Korean listeners in both English and Korean were comparable to ANLs obtained from monolingual English listeners. The results showed that ANLs obtained in English (ANL-E) did not differ significantly for the bilingual and monolingual listeners. Additionally, a cross-language comparison, within bilinguals, showed that ANLs obtained using Korean (ANL-K) speech stimuli were not significantly different from ANL-E. Finally, speech perception in noise did not correlate with ANLs in English or Korean for the bilingual listeners. Results suggest that the ANL measure is language independent within bilinguals and may be of potential clinical use in minority language groups.