Carroll Rebecca, Uslar Verena, Brand Thomas, Ruigendijk Esther
1Cluster of Excellence "Hearing4all", 2Institute of Dutch Studies, and 3Medizinische Physik, University of Oldenburg, Oldenburg, Germany.
Ear Hear. 2016 Nov/Dec;37(6):e391-e401. doi: 10.1097/AUD.0000000000000339.
The authors aimed to determine whether hearing impairment affects sentence comprehension beyond phoneme or word recognition (i.e., on the sentence level), and to distinguish grammatically induced processing difficulties in structurally complex sentences from perceptual difficulties associated with listening to degraded speech. Effects of hearing impairment or speech in noise were expected to reflect hearer-specific speech recognition difficulties. Any additional processing time caused by the sustained perceptual challenges across the sentence may either be independent of or interact with top-down processing mechanisms associated with grammatical sentence structure.
Forty-nine participants listened to canonical subject-initial or noncanonical object-initial sentences that were presented either in quiet or in noise. Twenty-four participants had mild-to-moderate hearing impairment and received hearing-loss-specific amplification. Twenty-five participants were age-matched peers with normal hearing status. Reaction times were measured on-line at syntactically critical processing points as well as two control points to capture differences in processing mechanisms. An off-line comprehension task served as an additional indicator of sentence (mis)interpretation, and enforced syntactic processing.
The authors found general effects of hearing impairment and speech in noise that negatively affected perceptual processing, and an effect of word order, where complex grammar locally caused processing difficulties for the noncanonical sentence structure. Listeners with hearing impairment were hardly affected by noise at the beginning of the sentence, but were affected markedly toward the end of the sentence, indicating a sustained perceptual effect of speech recognition. Comprehension of sentences with noncanonical word order was negatively affected by degraded signals even after sentence presentation.
Hearing impairment adds perceptual processing load during sentence processing, but affects grammatical processing beyond the word level to the same degree as in normal hearing, with minor differences in processing mechanisms. The data contribute to our understanding of individual differences in speech perception and language understanding. The authors interpret their results within the ease of language understanding model.
作者旨在确定听力障碍是否会在音素或单词识别之外（即在句子层面）影响句子理解，并区分结构复杂句子中由语法引起的处理困难与听受损语音相关的感知困难。听力障碍或噪声中的语音影响预计会反映出听者特定的语音识别困难。句子中持续的感知挑战所导致的任何额外处理时间可能独立于或与与语法句子结构相关的自上而下处理机制相互作用。
49名参与者听取了在安静或噪声环境中呈现的典型主语开头或非典型宾语开头的句子。24名参与者有轻度至中度听力障碍，并接受了针对听力损失的特定放大。25名参与者是年龄匹配的听力正常的同龄人。在句法关键处理点以及两个控制点在线测量反应时间，以捕捉处理机制的差异。一项离线理解任务作为句子（错误）解释的额外指标，并强化句法处理。
作者发现听力障碍和噪声中的语音产生了负面影响感知处理的一般效应，以及词序效应，即复杂语法在局部给非典型句子结构造成处理困难。有听力障碍的听者在句子开头几乎不受噪声影响，但在句子结尾受到明显影响，表明语音识别存在持续的感知效应。即使在句子呈现后，非典型词序句子的理解也受到降级信号的负面影响。
听力障碍在句子处理过程中增加了感知处理负荷，但在超出单词层面的语法处理方面，与正常听力的情况影响程度相同，只是在处理机制上有细微差异。这些数据有助于我们理解语音感知和语言理解中的个体差异。作者在语言理解难易模型中解释了他们的结果。
