Department of Psychology, Speech and Hearing Research Center, Key Laboratory on Machine Perception (Ministry of Education), Peking University, Beijing 100871, China.
Schizophr Res. 2012 Jan;134(1):33-41. doi: 10.1016/j.schres.2011.09.019. Epub 2011 Oct 21.
In "cocktail-party" environments, although listeners feel it difficult to recognize attended speech due to both energetic masking and informational masking, they can use various perceptual/cognitive cues, such as content and voice primes, to facilitate their attention to target speech. In patients with schizophrenia, both speech-perception deficits and increased vulnerability to masking stimuli generally occur. This study investigated whether speech recognition in first-episode patients (FEPs) and chronic patients (CPs) of schizophrenia is more vulnerable to noise masking and/or speech masking than that in demographics-matched-healthy controls, and whether patients with schizophrenia can use primes to unmask speech. In a trial under the priming condition, before the target sentence containing three keywords was co-presented with a noise or speech masker, the prime (early part of the sentence including the first two keywords) was recited in quiet with the target-speaker's voice. The results show that in patients, target-speech recognition was more impaired under speech-masking conditions than noise-masking conditions, and the impairment in CPs (n=22) was larger than that in FEPs (n=12). Although working memory for holding prime-content information in patients, especially CPs, was more vulnerable to masking, especially speech masking, than that in healthy controls, patients were still able to use the prime to unmask the last keyword. Thus, in "cocktail-party" environments, speech recognition in people with schizophrenia is more vulnerable to masking, particularly informational masking, and the speech-recognition impairment augments as the illness progresses. However, people with schizophrenia can use the content/voice prime to reduce energetic masking and informational masking of target speech.
在“鸡尾酒会”环境中，尽管听众由于能量掩蔽和信息掩蔽而感到难以识别参与的演讲，但他们可以使用各种感知/认知线索，如内容和语音提示，来促进对目标演讲的注意力。在精神分裂症患者中，通常会出现语音感知缺陷和对掩蔽刺激的易感性增加。本研究调查了首发精神分裂症患者（FEPs）和慢性精神分裂症患者（CPs）的言语识别是否比年龄匹配的健康对照组更容易受到噪声掩蔽和/或语音掩蔽的影响，以及精神分裂症患者是否可以使用提示来解除语音掩蔽。在提示条件下的一项试验中，在包含三个关键词的目标句子与噪声或语音掩蔽器同时呈现之前，用目标说话者的声音在安静环境中背诵提示（句子的早期部分，包括前两个关键词）。结果表明，在患者中，在语音掩蔽条件下，目标语音识别受到的损害比噪声掩蔽条件下更大，而在 CPs（n=22）中的损害比在 FEPs（n=12）中更大。尽管患者，特别是 CPs，在保持提示内容信息的工作记忆方面更容易受到掩蔽的影响，尤其是语音掩蔽，但患者仍然能够使用提示来解除最后一个关键词的掩蔽。因此，在“鸡尾酒会”环境中，精神分裂症患者的语音识别更容易受到掩蔽的影响，尤其是信息掩蔽，并且随着疾病的进展，语音识别障碍会加剧。然而，精神分裂症患者可以使用内容/语音提示来减少目标语音的能量掩蔽和信息掩蔽。
