Department of Psychology, Speech and Hearing Research Center, Key Laboratory on Machine Perception (Ministry of Education), Peking University, Beijing 100871, China.
Hear Res. 2012 Jan;283(1-2):136-43. doi: 10.1016/j.heares.2011.11.001. Epub 2011 Nov 10.
Presenting the early part of a nonsense sentence in quiet improves recognition of the last keyword of the sentence in a masker, especially a speech masker. This priming effect depends on higher-order processing of the prime information during target-masker segregation. This study investigated whether introducing irrelevant content information into the prime reduces the priming effect. The results showed that presenting the first four syllables (not including the second and third keywords) of the three-keyword target sentence in quiet significantly improved recognition of the second and third keywords in a two-talker-speech masker but not a noise masker, relative to the no-priming condition. Increasing the prime content from four to eight syllables (including the first and second keywords of the target sentence) further improved recognition of the third keyword in either the noise or speech masker. However, if the last four syllables of the eight-syllable prime were replaced by four irrelevant syllables (which did not occur in the target sentence), all the prime-induced speech-recognition improvements disappeared. Thus, knowing the early part of the target sentence mainly reduces informational masking of target speech, possibly by helping listeners attend to the target speech. Increasing the informative content of the prime further improves target-speech recognition probably by reducing the processing load. The reduction of the priming effect by adding irrelevant information to the prime is not due to introducing additional masking of the target speech.
在安静的环境中呈现一个荒谬句子的开头部分，可以提高被掩蔽的句子最后一个关键词的识别率，尤其是在语音掩蔽的情况下。这种启动效应取决于目标-掩蔽物分离过程中对启动信息的高阶处理。本研究探讨了在启动中引入不相关的内容信息是否会降低启动效应。结果表明，在安静环境中呈现三关键词目标句的前四个音节（不包括第二和第三个关键词），与无启动条件相比，能显著提高在双说话人语音掩蔽下但不能在噪声掩蔽下对第二和第三个关键词的识别率。将启动内容从四个音节增加到八个音节（包括目标句的前两个关键词），无论是在噪声还是语音掩蔽下，都能进一步提高对第三个关键词的识别率。然而，如果将八个音节的启动的最后四个音节替换为四个不相关的音节（这些音节不在目标句中出现），则所有由启动引起的语音识别改善都消失了。因此，了解目标句的开头部分主要可以减少目标语音的信息掩蔽，这可能是通过帮助听众关注目标语音来实现的。增加启动信息的内容可以进一步提高目标语音的识别率，这可能是通过减少处理负荷来实现的。在启动中添加不相关信息会降低启动效应，这并不是因为引入了额外的目标语音掩蔽。
