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Purpose

The purpose of this study was to examine sentence-recognition performance for a large, diverse group of nonnative speakers of English on the recently developed Basic English Lexicon (BEL) sentence materials and to determine whether BEL sentence lists are equated in difficulty for this population.

Method

The BEL sentences were presented to 102 nonnative speakers of English with normal hearing and varied linguistic and cultural backgrounds. Five hundred sentences were presented mixed with noise spectrally matched to the target sentences. Subjects completed an online questionnaire providing detailed demographic and linguistic information. Listeners' spoken English proficiency was also assessed using the Versant English Test (Pearson Education, 2010).

Results

Nonnative listeners showed equal word-recognition performance for 3 groups of BEL sentence lists, each group containing sentence …