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Full-Text Articles in Psychology
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …