Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
Articles 1 - 21 of 21
Full-Text Articles in Entire DC Network
Characterizing The Relationship Between Accented Speech Intelligibility And Listening Effort, Mel Mallard
Characterizing The Relationship Between Accented Speech Intelligibility And Listening Effort, Mel Mallard
Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Unfamiliar accents can make speech communication difficult, both by reducing speech intelligibility and by increasing the effort listeners must put forth to understand speech. However, these two constructs, while related, are independent: for example, two 100% intelligible utterances may require different amounts of effort to accurately process. To better characterize the relationship between intelligibility and effort, this study presents speakers of four intelligibility levels (one natively-accented English speaker, and three Mandarin-accented English speakers) within a dual-task paradigm (featuring a vibrotactile secondary task) to measure listening effort. We found a negative nonlinear relationship between intelligibility and effort, with the steepest slope …
Listening Effort: Separating The Subjective From The Objective, Joseph E. Rovetti
Listening Effort: Separating The Subjective From The Objective, Joseph E. Rovetti
Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository
Challenges such as background noise may increase “listening effort.” This construct has been operationalized as the recruitment of cognitive resources during listening (objective effort) or as the self-reported feeling of effort (subjective effort). In the current study, I compared these two dimensions of listening effort directly. Normal-hearing adults listened to highly intelligible passages across several signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs), with reaction time on a secondary task (objective effort) and effort ratings (subjective effort) measured in separate blocks. As the SNR became less favourable, subjective effort appeared to increase continuously, while objective effort only began to increase at a much less favourable …
Timing Is Stressful: Do Listeners Combine Meaning And Rhythm To Predict Speech?, Molly Mcleod
Timing Is Stressful: Do Listeners Combine Meaning And Rhythm To Predict Speech?, Molly Mcleod
Honors Theses
English and other languages such as German are stress-timed languages: the timing of the speech is determined by stressed and unstressed syllables, providing structure for sentences. While natural speech is not generally metrically regular, like in Shakespearean poetry, it still conveys timing cues through stress. Prior research has found that metric regularity enhances the processing of words (Rothermich et al, 2012), potentially because it attunes listeners’ attention to the predictability of stressed, and therefore important, syllables. Other work (e.g., Rogers, 2017) has suggested that predictability in the form of semantic associations (e.g., hearing “barn” facilitates understanding of “hay”) is a …
Effect Of Instruction Language On English-Spanish Bilinguals' Speech Perception, Alexa Andrade
Effect Of Instruction Language On English-Spanish Bilinguals' Speech Perception, Alexa Andrade
Undergraduate Honors Theses
Throughout the years, researchers have investigated the various advantages that may exist of being bilingual; however, it is unknown how switching between languages affects a person’s basic perception of speech sounds. The goal of this thesis was to determine whether Spanish-English bilinguals respond to auditory stimuli differently based on the language in which they receive task instructions. Participants were randomly assigned to receive instructions and complete the study entirely in English or Spanish, thus thinking in the language that they were assigned. In the study, participants listened to three different sets of recordings, which could be perceived as a word …
Audiovisual Speech Processing: Implications For Speech Perception And Language Development, Ryan Andrew Cannistraci
Audiovisual Speech Processing: Implications For Speech Perception And Language Development, Ryan Andrew Cannistraci
Doctoral Dissertations
This dissertation aims to empirically assess the complex, multileveled relationships between audiovisual speech perception and early language development. The majority of extant language development research has justifiably focused on infants’ ability to learn language from auditory input, and indeed, infants are precocious auditory learners (Saffran & Kirkham, 2018). Complementary to auditory speech, however, are the necessarily redundant facial movements used to articulate speech. Outside of language development research, multimodal processing has been theorized to facilitate perceptual learning and cognitive development (Bahrick & Lickliter, 2000), but only a small number of empirical studies have investigated how audiovisual speech perception in infancy …
Testing The Common-Mechanisms Theory Of False Hearing And False Memory: The Roles Of Executive Functioning And Inhibitory Control, Eric Failes
Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Recent studies have shown that older adults are more susceptible to context-based misperceptions in hearing than are younger adults, a phenomenon that has been referred to as false hearing (Rogers et al., 2012; Sommers et al., 2015). The authors of these studies have noted similarities between false hearing and false memories (Jacoby et al., 2005), suggesting that the two phenomena may arise from similar cognitive mechanisms. The present dissertation project investigated similarities between false hearing and false memories. In Experiment 1, I directly compared susceptibility to false hearing and false memories in younger and older adults. I then investigated two …
The Relationship Between Schizotypal Traits And The Perceptual Processes Of Multisensory Integration, Temporal Processing, And Speech Perception, Anne-Marie Muller
The Relationship Between Schizotypal Traits And The Perceptual Processes Of Multisensory Integration, Temporal Processing, And Speech Perception, Anne-Marie Muller
Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository
Multisensory integration, the binding of sensory information from different sensory modalities, may contribute to perceptual symptomatology in schizophrenia, including hallucilllnations and aberrant speech perception. Differences in multisensory integration and temporal processing, an important component of multisensory integration, are consistently found in schizophrenia. Evidence is emerging that these differences extend across the schizophrenia spectrum, including individuals in the general population with higher schizotypal traits. In two studies, the relationship between schizotypal traits and perceptual functioning is investigated. We hypothesized associations between higher schizotypal traits and decreased multisensory integration, increased auditory speech distractibility, and less precise temporal processing. In Study 1, higher …
Investigating The Relationship Between Gaze Behavior And Audiovisual Benefit Across Various Speech-To-Noise Ratios, Lauren Gaunt
Investigating The Relationship Between Gaze Behavior And Audiovisual Benefit Across Various Speech-To-Noise Ratios, Lauren Gaunt
Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Speech perception improves when listeners are able to see as well as hear a talker, compared to listening alone. This phenomenon is commonly referred to as audiovisual (AV) benefit (Sommers et al., 2005). According to the Principle of Inverse Effectiveness (PoIE), the benefit of multimodal (e.g. audiovisual) input should increase as unimodal (e.g. auditory-only) stimulus clarity decreases. However, recent findings contradict the PoIE, indicating that it should be reassessed. One method for investigating the factors that contribute to AV speech benefit is to examine listeners’ gaze behavior with eye tracking. The present study compared young adults’ (N=50) gaze …
Characterizing The Familiar-Voice Benefit To Intelligibility, Beatriz Ysabel Domingo
Characterizing The Familiar-Voice Benefit To Intelligibility, Beatriz Ysabel Domingo
Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository
Everyday listening often occurs in the presence of background noise. Listeners with normal hearing can often successfully segregate competing sounds from the signal of interest. To do this, listeners exploit a variety of cues to facilitate the separation of simultaneous sounds into separate sources, and group sequential sounds into intelligible speech streams. One of the cues that has been shown to be an effective facilitator of speech intelligibility is familiarity with a talker’s voice. A recent study by Johnsrude et al. (2013) measured speech intelligibility of a naturally familiar voice (i.e., that of a long-term spouse) and showed a …
Task-Evoked Pupillary Response For Completely Intelligible Accented Speech, Drew Mclaughlin
Task-Evoked Pupillary Response For Completely Intelligible Accented Speech, Drew Mclaughlin
Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Speech perception under adverse conditions, such as those caused by noise in the environment or a speaker’s accent, can be cognitively demanding. For second language- (L2-) accented speech, mismatches between the speech patterns of an L2-accented speaker and a listener can result in poorer understanding and reduced intelligibility (i.e., fewer words in the speech stream can be correctly identified). However, it remains unclear whether completely intelligible L2-accented speech imposes greater cognitive load (defined here as the degree to which cognitive resources are recruited at a given moment to meet processing demands) than native speech. In the current study, we used …
The Effects Of Pitch And Speaking Rate On Foreign Accented Speech Perception., Rebecca F. Davis
The Effects Of Pitch And Speaking Rate On Foreign Accented Speech Perception., Rebecca F. Davis
College of Arts & Sciences Senior Honors Theses
Perception of foreign accent is typically studied using an accentedness rating task. For example, native English listeners rate the degree of accentedness in sentences produced by non-native English speakers. However, in past studies, it has been unclear what criteria participants used to judge accentedness. Here, native English speakers rated the accentedness of Korean-accented English sentences on a scale from 1 (strong accent) to 9 (little to no accent). Participants rated sentences that were unmodified or had one acoustic property removed. In one block, pitch contours of sentences were flattened and set to their mean values. In another block, speaking rates …
Music, Language, And Rhythmic Timing, Rhimmon Simchy-Gross
Music, Language, And Rhythmic Timing, Rhimmon Simchy-Gross
Graduate Theses and Dissertations
Neural, perceptual, and cognitive oscillations synchronize with rhythmic events in both speech (Luo & Poeppel, 2007) and music (Snyder & Large, 2005). This synchronization decreases perceptual thresholds to temporally predictable events (Lawrance et al., 2014), improves task performance (Ellis & Jones, 2010), and enables speech intelligibility (Peelle & Davis, 2012). Despite implications of music-language transfer effects for improving language outcomes (Gordon et al., 2015), proposals that shared neural and cognitive resources underlie music and speech rhythm perception (e.g., Tierney & Kraus, 2014) are not yet substantiated. The present research aimed to explore this potential overlap by testing whether music-induced oscillations …
Through The Ear, To The Brain: How Cognitive Aging Impacts Veridical And False Hearing In The Presence Of Misleading Context, Eric Failes
Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations
A consistent finding in the literature (Benichov, Cox, Tun, & Wingfield, 2012; Dubno, Ahlstrom, & Horwitz, 2000; Hutchinson, 1989; Nittrouer & Boothroyd, 1990; Pichora-Fuller, Schneider & Daneman, 1995; Rogers, Jacoby, & Sommers, 2012; Sommers & Danielson, 1999; Wingfield, Aberdeen, & Stine, 1991) is that spoken word identification improves for both older and younger adults following the addition of a meaningful semantic context, but the improvements are typically greater for older adults. However, more recent findings (Jacoby, Rogers, Bishara, & Shimizu, 2012; Rogers, Jacoby, & Sommers, 2012) suggest that, especially under less favorable perceptual conditions, the increased benefits of semantic context …
Assessing The Relationship Between Talker Normalization And Spectral Contrast Effects In Speech Perception., Ashley Atri Assgari
Assessing The Relationship Between Talker Normalization And Spectral Contrast Effects In Speech Perception., Ashley Atri Assgari
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Speech perception is influenced by context. This influence can help to alleviate issues that arise from the extreme acoustic variability of speech. Two examples of contextual influences are talker normalization and spectral contrast effects (SCEs). Talker normalization occurs when listeners hear different talkers causing speech perception to be slower and less accurate. SCEs occur when spectral characteristics change from context sentences to target vowels and speech perception is biased by that change. It has been demonstrated that SCEs are restrained when contexts are spoken by different talkers (Assgari & Stilp, 2015). However, what about hearing different talkers restrains these effects …
Event-Related Potential Markers Of Perceptual And Conceptual Speech Processes In Patients With Disorders Of Consciousness., Stephen T. Beukema
Event-Related Potential Markers Of Perceptual And Conceptual Speech Processes In Patients With Disorders Of Consciousness., Stephen T. Beukema
Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository
Vegetative state (VS) and minimally conscious state (MCS) patients behaviorally demonstrate absent or fluctuating levels of awareness. Functional magnetic resonance imaging evidence of covert perceptual and semantic speech processing provides prognostic value for these patients. In this thesis, I examined the utility of high-density electroencephalography (EEG) in this regard. A contrast between event-related potentials (ERPs) elicited by primed and unprimed word pairs was used to isolate conceptual (semantic) processes, while ERPs elicited by signal-correlated noise were contrasted with those elicited by speech to isolate pre-semantic, perceptual aspects of speech processing. These ERP effects were found to be both temporally and …
Infants' Sensitivity To Fine Durational Cues In Speech Perception, Alyssa K. Kuiack
Infants' Sensitivity To Fine Durational Cues In Speech Perception, Alyssa K. Kuiack
Undergraduate Honours Theses
Previous research has indicated that infants as young as 3 days of age show sensitivity to prosodic stress patterns and can use this information to distinguish word boundaries (Christophe et al., 1994). Older infants have also exhibited an ability to use prosodic stress patterns to segment streams of speech (Echols et al., 1997) and have shown a preference for samples of speech with the patterns of prosody displayed by their native language versus the prosodic patterns typical of other non-native languages (Werker & Tees 1984, Juscyzk et al. 1993). Adults have demonstrated the ability of language discrimination based strictly on …
The Effect Of Age-Related Declines In Inhibitory Control On Audiovisual Speech Intelligibility, Avanti Dey
The Effect Of Age-Related Declines In Inhibitory Control On Audiovisual Speech Intelligibility, Avanti Dey
All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs)
Audiovisual: AV) speech perception is perception in which both auditory and visual information is available in order to understand a talker, compared to an auditory signal alone, during face-to-face communication. This form of communication yields significantly higher word recognition performance as compared to either sensory modality alone, constituting a general AV advantage for speech perception. Despite an overall AV advantage, older adults seem to receive less benefit from this bimodal presentation than do younger adults. However, there is evidence to suggest that not all age-related deficits in AV speech perception are of a sensory nature, but are also influenced by …
The Effects Of Talker Variability And Talkers' Gender On The Perception Of Spoken Taboo Words, Samantha E. Tuft
The Effects Of Talker Variability And Talkers' Gender On The Perception Of Spoken Taboo Words, Samantha E. Tuft
ETD Archive
In the current experiment, I examined the effects of inter-talker variability and talkers' gender on listeners' perception of spoken taboo words. Previous spoken word recognition research using the long-term repetition-priming paradigm, in which listeners respond to two separate blocks of spoken words, found performance costs for stimuli mismatching in talker identity. That is, when words were repeated across the two blocks and the identity of the talker remained the same (e.g., male to male) reaction times (RTs) were faster relative to when the repeated words were spoken by two different talkers (e.g., male to female). Such performance costs, or talker …
Examining Whether Social Factors Affect Listeners Sensitivity To Talker-Specific Information During Their Online Perception Of Spoken Words, Jessica L. Newell
Examining Whether Social Factors Affect Listeners Sensitivity To Talker-Specific Information During Their Online Perception Of Spoken Words, Jessica L. Newell
ETD Archive
McLennan and Luce (2005) found no significant cost associated with changing which talker produced a particular word from the first block of trials to the second (no talker effects) when participants responded relatively quickly (easy lexical decision), and that talker effects emerged when participants responded relatively slowly (hard lexical decision). In a lexical decision task, participants hear words and nonwords and reaction times to correct responses are measured. In the current study, we examined whether social factors would lead to talker effects in an easy lexical decision task. In Experiment 1, participants were told that they have a chance to …
Examining The Effects Of Variation In Emotional Tone Of Voice On Spoken Word Recognition, Maura L. Wilson
Examining The Effects Of Variation In Emotional Tone Of Voice On Spoken Word Recognition, Maura L. Wilson
ETD Archive
Despite the importance of emotional tone of voice for optimal verbal communication, how emotional speech is processed and its effects on spoken word recognition have yet to be fully understood. The current study addressed these gaps in the literature by examining the effects of intra-talker variability in emotional tone of voice on listeners' ability to recognize spoken words. Two lexical decision experiments, varying in task difficulty, were implemented to analyze participants' percent correct (PC) and reaction times (RTs). Previous research on spoken word recognition using this paradigm has found performance costs resulting from stimuli that mismatch on specific information (e.g., …
Examining The Role Of Talker-Specific Details In The Perception Of Words Spoken By Famous Talkers, Alisa M. Maibauer
Examining The Role Of Talker-Specific Details In The Perception Of Words Spoken By Famous Talkers, Alisa M. Maibauer
ETD Archive
Previous work demonstrates that talker-specific details tend to affect language perception relatively late in processing. One possible explanation for this time-course effect may be that the listeners in the previous study were presented with unfamiliar talkers. Under conditions where one has been repeatedly exposed to a talker, as is typically the case with famous people, talker-specific details may affect perceptual processing relatively early. The present research sought to explore the potential for relatively early talker effects in the perception of words spoken by famous talkers in a speeded-shadowing task. Words were presented using a long-term repetition priming paradigm where half …