Speech recognition in the presence of background speech is challenged by a combination of energetic/peripheral and informational/central masking. Energetic masking is related to target audibility. Informational masking depends on linguistic, attentional, and cognitive factors (Cooke, García-Lecumberri, & Barker, 2008). We explored the linguistic component of informational masking by having English and Dutch listeners recognize English and/or Dutch sentences embedded in two-talker babble at different signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs). The babble was in either the same language (e.g., English-in-English), a typologically close language (e.g., English- in-Dutch), or a typologically distant language (e.g., English-in-Mandarin). We also compared recognition accuracy in babble consisting of either meaningful or semantically anomalous sentences. The results provide insight into how bottom-up perceptual processes (indexed by variation in energetic masking from different SNRs) interact with top-down learning and categorization mechanisms (indexed by variation in linguistic masking from different listener-,language- and content-related characteristics) for speech perception under adverse conditions.