Class
Article
Department
Communicative Disorders and Deaf Education Department
Faculty Mentor
Brittan Barker
Presentation Type
Poster Presentation
Abstract
Although contextual information can help improve listeners’ perception and understanding of speech, it may not always help in certain conditions. Reasons for this are that when a speech signal is masked by background noise and/or the speaker has a speech disorder, listeners seem to rely most heavily on the acoustic phonetic content of the words in a sentence, rather than the contextual information (Dongilli, 1994). For this study, we aimed to identify and analyze the impact of context effects on spoken word recognition in the presence of a degraded speech signal and various levels of background noise. To do so, listeners with typical hearing were presented 372 test sentences that had either high- or low-predictability and tasked with repeating the final word of each sentence they heard. Each sentence was spoken by one of two age-matched females: either one with dysarthric speech or one with neurologically healthy speech. Speech-shaped noise was created for each speaker and we varied the SNR across sentences (yielding a total of 6 different listening conditions). The word recognition results of this study suggest that listeners are better able to understand what is being said when they are provided contextual information. Future studies in which the sentences are counterbalanced across both talkers should be completed to ensure that order effects do not impact the findings of this study. Presentation Time: Thursday, 2-3 p.m.Zoom link: https://usu-edu.zoom.us/j/88063585042?pwd=U0NVaHJkRTMzeTVwbERQMk81ZCtQUT09
Location
Logan, UT
Start Date
4-12-2021 12:00 AM
Included in
Contextual Effects on Listeners' Word Recognition in Combined Degradations
Logan, UT
Although contextual information can help improve listeners’ perception and understanding of speech, it may not always help in certain conditions. Reasons for this are that when a speech signal is masked by background noise and/or the speaker has a speech disorder, listeners seem to rely most heavily on the acoustic phonetic content of the words in a sentence, rather than the contextual information (Dongilli, 1994). For this study, we aimed to identify and analyze the impact of context effects on spoken word recognition in the presence of a degraded speech signal and various levels of background noise. To do so, listeners with typical hearing were presented 372 test sentences that had either high- or low-predictability and tasked with repeating the final word of each sentence they heard. Each sentence was spoken by one of two age-matched females: either one with dysarthric speech or one with neurologically healthy speech. Speech-shaped noise was created for each speaker and we varied the SNR across sentences (yielding a total of 6 different listening conditions). The word recognition results of this study suggest that listeners are better able to understand what is being said when they are provided contextual information. Future studies in which the sentences are counterbalanced across both talkers should be completed to ensure that order effects do not impact the findings of this study. Presentation Time: Thursday, 2-3 p.m.Zoom link: https://usu-edu.zoom.us/j/88063585042?pwd=U0NVaHJkRTMzeTVwbERQMk81ZCtQUT09