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Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons™
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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Pupil Dilation Is Sensitive To Semantic Ambiguity And Acoustic Degradation, Mason Kadem, Björn Herrmann, Jennifer M. Rodd, Ingrid S. Johnsrude
Pupil Dilation Is Sensitive To Semantic Ambiguity And Acoustic Degradation, Mason Kadem, Björn Herrmann, Jennifer M. Rodd, Ingrid S. Johnsrude
Brain and Mind Institute Researchers' Publications
© The Author(s) 2020. Speech comprehension is challenged by background noise, acoustic interference, and linguistic factors, such as the presence of words with more than one meaning (homonyms and homophones). Previous work suggests that homophony in spoken language increases cognitive demand. Here, we measured pupil dilation—a physiological index of cognitive demand—while listeners heard high-ambiguity sentences, containing words with more than one meaning, or well-matched low-ambiguity sentences without ambiguous words. This semantic-ambiguity manipulation was crossed with an acoustic manipulation in two experiments. In Experiment 1, sentences were masked with 30-talker babble at 0 and +6 dB signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), and in …
Absorption And Enjoyment During Listening To Acoustically Masked Stories, Björn Herrmann, Ingrid S. Johnsrude
Absorption And Enjoyment During Listening To Acoustically Masked Stories, Björn Herrmann, Ingrid S. Johnsrude
Brain and Mind Institute Researchers' Publications
© The Author(s) 2020. Comprehension of speech masked by background sound requires increased cognitive processing, which makes listening effortful. Research in hearing has focused on such challenging listening experiences, in part because they are thought to contribute to social withdrawal in people with hearing impairment. Research has focused less on positive listening experiences, such as enjoyment, despite their potential importance in motivating effortful listening. Moreover, the artificial speech materials—such as disconnected, brief sentences—commonly used to investigate speech intelligibility and listening effort may be ill-suited to capture positive experiences when listening is challenging. Here, we investigate how listening to naturalistic spoken …