Grieco-Calub Tina M, Simeon Katherine M, Snyder Hillary E, Lew-Williams Casey
The Roxelyn & Richard Pepper Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA.
Department of Psychology, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA.
Lang Cogn Neurosci. 2017;32(10):1344-1356. doi: 10.1080/23273798.2017.1354129. Epub 2017 Jul 20.
Spectral degradation reduces access to the acoustics of spoken language and compromises how learners break into its structure. We hypothesised that spectral degradation disrupts word segmentation, but that listeners can exploit other cues to restore detection of words. Normal-hearing adults were familiarised to artificial speech that was unprocessed or spectrally degraded by noise-band vocoding into 16 or 8 spectral channels. The monotonic speech stream was pause-free (Experiment 1), interspersed with isolated words (Experiment 2), or slowed by 33% (Experiment 3). Participants were tested on segmentation of familiar vs. novel syllable sequences and on recognition of individual syllables. As expected, vocoding hindered both word segmentation and syllable recognition. The addition of isolated words, but not slowed speech, improved segmentation. We conclude that syllable recognition is necessary but not sufficient for successful word segmentation, and that isolated words can facilitate listeners' access to the structure of acoustically degraded speech.
频谱退化会减少对口语声学特征的获取,并影响学习者对其结构的理解。我们假设频谱退化会干扰单词切分,但听众可以利用其他线索来恢复单词的识别。听力正常的成年人熟悉未经过处理的人工语音,或者通过噪声带声码器将其频谱退化到16或8个频谱通道。单调的语音流没有停顿(实验1),穿插有孤立单词(实验2),或者语速减慢33%(实验3)。参与者接受了熟悉音节序列与新音节序列的切分测试以及单个音节的识别测试。正如预期的那样,声码处理阻碍了单词切分和音节识别。添加孤立单词而非减慢语速,改善了切分效果。我们得出结论,音节识别对于成功的单词切分是必要的,但不是充分的,并且孤立单词可以帮助听众理解声学退化语音的结构。