Does Sentence-Level Coarticulation Affect Speech Recognition in Noise or a Speech Masker?

Autor/inn/en	Jett, Brandi; Buss, Emily; Best, Virginia; Oleson, Jacob; Calandruccio, Lauren
Titel	Does Sentence-Level Coarticulation Affect Speech Recognition in Noise or a Speech Masker?
Quelle	In: Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 64 (2021) 4, S.1390-1403 (14 Seiten) PDF als Volltext Verfügbarkeit
Zusatzinformation	ORCID (Buss, Emily) ORCID (Calandruccio, Lauren)
Sprache	englisch
Dokumenttyp	gedruckt; online; Zeitschriftenaufsatz
ISSN	1092-4388
Schlagwörter	College Students; Young Adults; Articulation (Speech); Auditory Perception; Word Recognition; Sentences; Acoustics; Semantics; Psychometrics; Ohio (Cleveland) + Suchen Sie Ihr Suchwort? Collegestudent; Young adult; Junger Erwachsener; Auditive Wahrnehmung; Akustische Wahrnehmung; Akustik; Worterkennung; Sentence analysis; Satzanalyse; Semantik; Psychometry; Psychometrie
Abstract	Purpose: Three experiments were conducted to better understand the role of between-word coarticulation in masked speech recognition. Specifically, we explored whether naturally coarticulated sentences supported better masked speech recognition as compared to sentences derived from individually spoken concatenated words. We hypothesized that sentence recognition thresholds (SRTs) would be similar for coarticulated and concatenated sentences in a noise masker but would be better for coarticulated sentences in a speech masker. Method: Sixty young adults participated (n = 20 per experiment). An adaptive tracking procedure was used to estimate SRTs in the presence of noise or two-talker speech maskers. Targets in Experiments 1 and 2 were matrix-style sentences, while targets in Experiment 3 were semantically meaningful sentences. All experiments included coarticulated and concatenated targets; Experiments 2 and 3 included a third target type, concatenated keyword-intensity-matched (KIM) sentences, in which the words were concatenated but individually scaled to replicate the intensity contours of the coarticulated sentences. Results: Regression analyses evaluated the main effects of target type, masker type, and their interaction. Across all three experiments, effects of target type were small (< 2 dB). In Experiment 1, SRTs were slightly poorer for coarticulated than concatenated sentences. In Experiment 2, coarticulation facilitated speech recognition compared to the concatenated KIM condition. When listeners had access to semantic context (Experiment 3), a coarticulation benefit was observed in noise but not in the speech masker. Conclusions: Overall, differences between SRTs for sentences with and without between-word coarticulation were small. Beneficial effects of coarticulation were only observed relative to the concatenated KIM targets; for unscaled concatenated targets, it appeared that consistent audibility across the sentence offsets any benefit of coarticulation. Contrary to our hypothesis, effects of coarticulation generally were not more pronounced in speech maskers than in noise maskers. (As Provided).
Anmerkungen	American Speech-Language-Hearing Association. 2200 Research Blvd #250, Rockville, MD 20850. Tel: 301-296-5700; Fax: 301-296-8580; e-mail: slhr@asha.org; Web site: http://jslhr.pubs.asha.org
Erfasst von	ERIC (Education Resources Information Center), Washington, DC
Update	2024/1/01