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Different Error Patterns Of /L/ In Children And Speech-Language Pathologists' Perception And Treatment, Grace E. Lemoine

LSU Master's Theses

Children often simplify target speech sounds using phonological processes, or common developmental error patterns. However, some children produce less common error patterns that differ from common errors. In the current study, less common errors involving /l/ sounds were studied as the phoneme /l/ is a sound that is subject to frequent misarticulations in young children and perceptual confusion among listeners. The current study focused on less common errors because studies have suggested that atypical errors can indicate weak phonological representations and poor phonological awareness skills, which can have long-term effects on children’s literacy skills. Therefore, the aim of the current …

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 …

Evaluating The Impacts Of Accent And Semantic Context On Listening Effort, Avanti Khare

Honors Theses

Nonnative accented speech is associated with increased listening effort for English-monolingual listeners, even if the speech signal is intelligible. Semantic context is a global characteristic of English phrases that quantifies the degree to which words communicate a cohesive idea. Previous research suggests that semantic context may be used as a helping factor during speech perception in adverse conditions. The current work examines the relationship between speaker accent and semantic context using global semantic anomalies. Participants performed a randomly prompted recall task during lists of varying semantic context levels recorded by native and nonnative-accented speakers. Results are discussed in terms of …

Investigating Speech Perception In Children With Speech Delay, Dyslexia, And Speech Delay And Dyslexia, Lauren Marie Spencer

Theses and Dissertations

Perceptual deficits related to phonology in children with speech delay (SD) and children with dyslexia have been identified in separate lines of research. However, there has only been a small number of studies that have investigated the perceptual deficits of children with SD and/or dyslexia in the same study to better understand the overlap of their speech perception abilities. Children with SD have previously shown deficits perceiving speech stimuli that is acoustically sparse, particularly when stimuli contain speech sounds they do not produce correctly. Yet in contrast to children with dyslexia, children with SD are better able to recover linguistic …

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 …

The Effects Of Stimulus Type On Interpersonal And Intrapersonal Speech Perception In Typical Adults, Melannee Wursten Ipsen

Theses and Dissertations

Children with speech sound disorders (SSD) often have difficulties with speech perception. Speech perception is the ability to intake speech sounds and interpret them for meaning. Understanding children’s speech perception abilities is pertinent because children use perceptual skills to hone accurate production during SSD treatment. Different types of stimuli have been used in speech perception research. At present, it is unclear how different types of speech stimuli differentially impact speech perception in typical listeners or children with SSD. In this study, we investigated perceptual skills for different speech types in neurotypical adults to better understand how stimulus type impacts perception …

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 …

Remote-Frequency Masking And Speech Perception In Adults, Taylor L. Arbogast

Dissertations, 2020-current

The primary purpose of this study is threefold: to use SRT measurements to examine the effect of various remote-frequency, narrowband maskers on adult’s perception of narrowband speech, to compare the performance between low and high band speech stimuli, and to evaluate the combination of these approaches by examining the correlation between the masking effect observed with speech and pure tone stimuli. Twelve subjects aged 22-34, with hearing thresholds no worse than 15 dB HL for frequencies 500-8000 Hz, participated in two listening tasks. In the speech perception task, coordinate response measure (CRM) sentences and their maskers were separately filtered into …

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 …

Finding The Means : The Bilingual Disparity In Semantic Context Use For Processing, Iyad Ghanim

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

Early and late bilinguals both differ in the speed with which they comprehend language or in their processing of sentences compared to monolinguals. This is possibly a result of crosslanguage interference, differential allocation of cognitive resources, or some other difference in language-dependent processes. This dissertation presents research and review focusing on one such language dependent process — the use of sentential context and lexical-associative semantic information — to process sentences. In a series of studies, 34 bilinguals and 28 monolinguals complete a retroactive masked priming task, which provides an isolated measure of the use of semantic information to backwards recognize …

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 …

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 …

Simultaneous Bilinguals’ Comprehension Of Accented Speech, Sita Carraturo

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

L2-accented speech recognition has typically been studied with monolingual listeners or late L2-learners, but simultaneous bilinguals may have a different experience: their two phonologies offer flexibility in phonological-lexical mapping (Samuel and Larraza, 2015), which may be advantageous. On the other hand, the two languages cause greater lexical competition (Marian & Spivey, 2003), which may impede successful L2-accented speech recognition. The competition between a bilinguals’ two languages is the oft-cited explanation, for example, as to why bilinguals underperform monolinguals in native-accented speech-in-noise tasks (Rogers et al., 2006).

To investigate the effect of bilingualism on L2-accented speech recognition, the current studies compare …

Lexical Properties Of Perceptual Errors Made By Younger And Older Adults Listening To Speech In Multitalker Babble, Hannah Blythe Vickery

Theses and Dissertations

Purpose: The purpose of this error analysis was to analyze the lexical properties of misperceptions made when listening to speech in multitalker babble.

Methods: Twenty young adults with normal hearing (YNH), 20 older adults with normal hearing (ONH), and 22 older adults with hearing impairment (OHI) completed a speech-in-babble task. Participants were asked to repeat the final word in 25 high and 25 low context sentences. On each trial, participants either responded with the correct target word, a misperception error, or skipped the trial response. Misperceptions were compiled and analyzed according to their lexical properties.

Results: Results of this study …

Measuring Speech Perception In Children With Speech Sound Disorders Using The Wide Range Acoustic Accuracy Scale, Briel Francis Garner

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to measure the speech perception of children with speech sound disorders and compare it to that of adults and typically developing children. A secondary purpose was to determine if an adaptive-tracking tool, the Wide Range Acoustic Accuracy Scale (WRAAS) equalized task demands across participants independent of perceptual ability. The participants included 31 adults, 15 typically developing children, and 15 children with speech sound disorders. Children with speech sound disorders all had difficulty producing /r/ correctly. Each participant completed perceptual testing discriminating differences in three syllable contrast pairs: /bÉ‘/-/wÉ‘/, /dÉ‘/-/gÉ‘/, and /rÉ‘/-/wÉ‘/. Results indicated that …

Encoding And Perception Of Voicing And Aspiration In Native And Non-Native Listeners In Quiet And In Background Noise, Reethee Antony

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The perception and encoding of voice cues in consonants have been well studied, whereas there has been relatively little research on aspiration. The current study examined the encoding and perception of aspiration and voicing in Hindi, American English, and Tamil listeners when relevant cues were and were not degraded by noise. This study is novel because of the inclusion of aspiration, the language groups, inclusion of noise masking, and inclusion of auditory evoked potentials (in addition to behavioral testing).

The first aim was to determine whether language groups for whom aspiration and/or voicing is phonemically contrastive show better perception and …

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 …

Individual Auditory Categorization Abilities Are Shaped By Intrinsic And Experience-Driven Neural Factors, Kelsey Mankel

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

To make sense of the auditory world, listeners must organize diverse, continuously varying sounds into meaningful perceptual categories. The auditory categorization process is believed to be a foundational skill for language development and speech perception. Despite decades of behavioral research, neuroscientific evidence is only beginning to uncover where, when, and how auditory categories arise in the brain. Although it has been proposed that categorical perception is shaped by both innate (nature) and experience-driven (nurture) factors, it is unclear how these features manifest neurally at the individual level. In the first study of this dissertation, we recorded multi-channel electroencephalography (EEG) in …

The Influence Of Socioindexical Information On The Speech Perception-Production Link: Evidence From A Shadowing Task, Kyler B. Laycock

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

The body of work on speech perception demonstrates the ability of listeners to utilize both visual and acoustic information in their processing of a given speech signal. More recent studies have established that listeners are sensitive to cues in both these modalities which inform their perception of a speaker's identity in parallel with the linguistic message, but the relationship between social information in perception and production together is unclear. This study reports the results of an experiment designed to test the hypothesis that expectations about a speakers identity is able to influence a listener's perception and production of speech in …

Examining The Effects Of Background Noise On Contextualized Word Learning, Caitlin Alyssa Ross

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports

Despite redundancy in the acoustic speech signal, both children and adults demonstrate difficulty listening and learning in noise. Research has shown that the acoustic parameters of classrooms and common study places, such as libraries and coffee shops, are often exposing students daily to unhealthy levels of background noise and distraction as they attempt to access and retain new information. While younger children may encounter new words via deliberate instruction in a classroom setting, older students are more likely to access new vocabulary indirectly via reading or self-study in noisy environments often of their own choosing. In both scenarios, accurate perception …

Cot In The Act: Ethnicity And Age Affects Phonemic Perception Of The Low-Back Merger In New York City English, Omar Ortiz

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

ABSTRACT

This paper is an experimental study on how perceptions about a speaker’s age and ethnicity may influence whether listeners perceive the THOUGHT / LOT distinction. The macro-categories of age and ethnicity have been found to correlate with the lowering of raised THOUGHT (Wong 2012, Becker 2010) and the favoring of the merged vowels in perception (Haddican et al. 2016). This thesis examines whether images of faces associated with different age and ethnicity categories condition perception of auditory stimuli as belonging to either the LOT or THOUGHT class. This thesis builds on previous results suggesting that non-linguistic information influences speech …

Should I Stay Or Should I Go? Talker-Specific Influences On Distributional Learning For Speech, Nicholas Monto

Doctoral Dissertations

There is no one-to-one mapping between speech acoustics and individual speech sounds. The acoustic cues produced for individual speech sounds show wide variability both within and across talkers. Nonetheless, listeners perceive the speech of familiar and novel talkers with ease. It is theorized that listeners achieve this by maintaining a degree of flexibility in how acoustics are mapped to speech sound categories. Building on previous work demonstrating that listeners are sensitive to individual talker differences in speech production, we test the hypothesis that distributional learning for input statistics is contextually governed by talker identity. Listeners (n = 320) completed two …

Perceptual Learning Of Noise-Vocoded Speech, Julia R. Drouin

Doctoral Dissertations

A challenge in the cochlear implant adaptation literature is accounting for wide variability in speech perception outcomes following implantation. While many preimplantation factors contribute to the variance observed in outcomes, formal auditory training has been proposed as a way to maximize speech comprehension benefits for cochlear implant users. However, there is currently no standardized set of recommendations as to how training should be implemented in the patient population. The goal of this dissertation was to examine two potential training variables of interest: time of day in which the training occurs and the task structure of training. This dissertation examined these …

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 …

The Impact Of Childhood Music Experience On Speech Perception And Processing: A Systematic Review, Erika Lanham

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Objective: The purpose of this investigation was to conduct a systematic review of the literature that addresses the impact of childhood musical experience on speech perception and processing abilities. Specifically, this review assessed how musical training impacted scores on both objective and behavioral tests of speech perception/processing in children. This analysis contributes to a better understanding of the effects of individual musical experience in childhood on our ability to perceive and process speech in a variety of listening conditions. This analysis also determined the clinical implications of such findings.

Methods: A comprehensive search utilizing the Web of Science database accessible …

Speech Perception Of Global Acoustic Structure In Children With Speech Delay, With And Without Dyslexia, Mikayla Nicole Madsen

Theses and Dissertations

Children with speech delay (SD) have underlying deficits in speech perception that may be related to reading skill. Children with SD and children with dyslexia have previously shown deficits for distinct perceptual characteristics, including segmental acoustic structure and global acoustic structure. In this study, 35 children (ages 7-9 years) with SD, SD + dyslexia, and/or typically developing were presented with a vocoded speech recognition task to investigate their perception of global acoustic speech structure. Findings revealed no differences in vocoded speech recognition between groups, regardless of SD or dyslexia status. These findings suggest that in children with SD, co-occurring dyslexia …

Speech Perception Of Global Acoustic Structure In Children With Speech Delay, With And Without Dyslexia, Mikayla Nicole Madsen

Theses and Dissertations

Children with speech delay (SD) have underlying deficits in speech perception that may be related to reading skill. Children with SD and children with dyslexia have previously shown deficits for distinct perceptual characteristics, including segmental acoustic structure and global acoustic structure. In this study, 35 children (ages 7-9 years) with SD, SD + dyslexia, and/or typically developing were presented with a vocoded speech recognition task to investigate their perception of global acoustic speech structure. Findings revealed no differences in vocoded speech recognition between groups, regardless of SD or dyslexia status. These findings suggest that in children with SD, co-occurring dyslexia …

Neural Representation Of Articulable And Inarticulable Novel Sound Contrasts: The Role Of The Dorsal Stream, David Saltzman

Master's Theses

No abstract provided.

Testing The Perceptual Magnet Effect In Monolinguals And Bilinguals, Michael C. Stern

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Previous research has demonstrated an apparent warping of the perceptual space whereby the best exemplars or ‘prototypes’ of speech sound categories minimize the perceptual distance between themselves and neighboring stimuli in the same category. This phenomenon has been termed the ‘perceptual magnet effect’ (PME). The present study extends work on the PME to a speech sound category previously unstudied in this paradigm (American English /æ/), and to bilingual speech sound representation and perception. American English monolinguals and Turkish-English bilinguals completed identification tasks, category goodness rating tasks, and same-different discrimination tasks with synthesized vowel sounds from the American English /æ/ category—not …

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 …