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Face Masks And Speech Perception: Emotions And Intelligibility Perceived By Monolingual And Bilingual Speakers, Monica Andrea Chulde Guayasamin

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

Speech perception in unfavorable conditions reduces the intelligibility of the message. The use of face masks may be one factor that degrades the comprehension of target words in transcription tasks and the recognition of emotional prosodies. Different researchers have proposed the influence of visual stimuli in the comprehension of the linguistic message (e.g., Tuomainen et al., 2005; Schwartz et al., 2004; Llamas et al., 2008; McGowan, 2015). This study reports the results of an experiment that tests how intelligibility and emotional prosody are affected by surgical masks. The online experiment has been applied to two groups of speakers from the …

The Effects Of Aging On Temporal Masking, Susan E. Fulton

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The ability to resolve rapid intensity and frequency fluctuations in sound is important for understanding speech, especially in real-world environments that include background noise and reverberation. Older listeners often complain of difficulties understanding speech in such real-world environments. One factor thought to influence speech understanding in noisy and reverberant environments is temporal resolution, the ability to follow rapid acoustic changes over time. Temporal resolution is thought to help listeners resolve rapid acoustic changes in speech as well as use small glimpses of speech available in the dips or gaps in the background sounds. Temporal resolution is an ability that is …

Effects Of Age And Hearing Loss On Perception Of Dynamic Speech Cues, Mei-Wa Tam Szeto

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Older listeners, both with and without hearing loss, often complain of difficulty understanding conversational speech. One reason for such difficulty may be a decreased ability to process the rapid changes in intensity, frequency, or temporal information that serve to differentiate speech sounds. Two important cues for the identification of stop consonants are the duration of the interruption of airflow (i.e., closure duration) and rapid spectral changes following the release of closure.

Many researchers have shown that age and hearing loss affect a listener's cue weighting strategies and trading relationship between spectral and temporal cues. The study of trading relationships between …

Vowel Identification By Monolingual And Bilingual Listeners: Use Of Spectral Change And Duration Cues, Merete Mã¸Ller Glasbrenner

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Recent studies have shown that even highly-proficient Spanish-English bilinguals, who acquired their second language (L2) in childhood and have little or no foreign accent in English, may require more acoustic information than monolinguals in order to identify English vowels and may have more difficulty than monolinguals in understanding speech in noise or reverberation (Mayo, Florentine, & Buus, 1997). One explanation that may account for this difference is that bilingual listeners use acoustic cues for vowel identification differently from monolinguals (Flege, 1995).

In this study, we investigated this hypothesis by comparing bilingual listeners’ use of acoustic cues to vowel identification to …

Effects Of Bilingualism, Noise, And Reverberation On Speech Perception By Listeners With Normal Hearing, Dashielle M. Febo

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The accurate perception of spoken English is influenced by many variables, including the listener's native language, reverberation, and background noise. Few studies of speech perception by bilingual listeners have carefully controlled for second language proficiency and even fewer have presented speech in everyday listening environments that contain noise and reverberation. In the present study, detailed language background, language proficiency information, and individual language samples were collected and the speech stimuli were presented in a variety of quiet, noisy, and reverberant listening environments.

The effects of noise and reverberation on the perception of American English monosyllabic words was examined for two …