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Full-Text Articles in Psychology

Listening Effort: Separating The Subjective From The Objective, Joseph E. Rovetti Aug 2022

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 Jun 2022

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 May 2022

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 …