Effects of intelligibility on within- and cross-modal sentence recognition memory for native and non-native listeners

The goal of the study was to examine whether the enhanced clarity of the speech signal, namely a listener-oriented clear speech, improves sentence recognition memory for native and non-native listeners, and whether this effect would hold across modality of presentation. The results showed that listener-oriented clear speech enhanced sentence recognition memory for both listener groups regardless of whether the acoustic signal is present during the test phase (Experiment I) or absent (Experiment II). Compared to native listeners, non-native listeners had longer reaction times in the within-modal task and were overall less accurate in the cross-modal task. The results showed that more cognitive resources remained available for storing information in memory during processing of easier-to-understand clearly produced sentences. Furthermore, second language processing additionally depleted cognitive resources needed for remembering speech information