Feng Tianquan, Chen Qingrong, Xiao Zhongdang
College of Teacher Education, Nanjing Normal University, Nanjing, China.
State Key Laboratory of Bioelectronics, School of Biological Science and Medical Engineering, Southeast University, Nanjing, China.
Front Psychol. 2018 Oct 9;9:1922. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01922. eCollection 2018.
The aims of the present study were to examine whether familiarity with a masker improves word recognition in speech masking situations and whether there are age-related differences in the effects of masker cuing. Thirty-two older listeners (range = 59-74; mean age = 66.41 years) with high-frequency hearing loss and 32 younger normal-hearing listeners (range = 21-28; mean age = 23.73) participated in this study, all of whom spoke Chinese as their first language. Two experiments were conducted and 16 younger and 16 older listeners were used in each experiment. The masking speech with different content from target speech with syntactically correct but semantically meaningless was a continuous recording of meaningless Chinese sentences spoken by two talkers. The masker level was adjusted to produce signal-to-masker ratios of -12, -8, -4, and 0 dB for the younger participants and -8, -4, 0, and 4 dB for the older participants. Under masker-priming conditions, a priming sentence, spoken by the masker talkers, was presented in quiet three times before a target sentence was presented together with a masker sentence 4 s later. In Experiment 1, using same-sentence masker-priming (identical to the masker sentence), the masker-priming improved the identification of the target sentence for both age groups compared to when no priming was provided. However, the amount of masking release was less in the older adults than in the younger adults. In Experiment 2, two kinds of primes were considered: same-sentence masker-priming, and different-sentence masker-priming (different from the masker sentence in content for each keyword). The results of Experiment 2 showed that both kinds of primes improved the identification of the targets for both age groups. However, the release from speech masking in both priming conditions was less in the older adults than in the younger adults, and the release from speech masking in both age groups was greater with same-sentence masker-priming than with different-sentence masker-priming. These results suggest that both the voice and content cues of a masker could be used to release target speech from maskers in noisy listening conditions. Furthermore, there was an age-related decline in masker-priming-induced release from speech masking.
本研究的目的是检验对掩蔽声的熟悉程度是否能改善言语掩蔽情况下的单词识别，以及掩蔽声提示效应是否存在与年龄相关的差异。32名高频听力损失的老年听众（年龄范围 = 59 - 74岁；平均年龄 = 66.41岁）和32名听力正常的年轻听众（年龄范围 = 21 - 28岁；平均年龄 = 23.73岁）参与了本研究，他们均以汉语为第一语言。进行了两项实验，每项实验使用16名年轻听众和16名老年听众。掩蔽语音与目标语音内容不同，由两名说话者说出的句法正确但语义无意义的汉语句子的连续录音组成。掩蔽声水平进行了调整，以使年轻参与者的信号掩蔽比为 -12、-8、-4和0 dB，老年参与者的信号掩蔽比为 -8、-4、0和4 dB。在掩蔽声启动条件下，在目标句子与掩蔽声句子在4秒后一起呈现之前，由掩蔽声说话者说出的启动句子在安静环境中呈现3次。在实验1中，使用同句子掩蔽声启动（与掩蔽声句子相同），与不提供启动相比，掩蔽声启动改善了两个年龄组对目标句子的识别。然而，老年人的掩蔽释放量比年轻人少。在实验2中，考虑了两种启动方式：同句子掩蔽声启动和不同句子掩蔽声启动（每个关键词的内容与掩蔽声句子不同）。实验2的结果表明，两种启动方式均改善了两个年龄组对目标的识别。然而，两种启动条件下老年人的言语掩蔽释放均比年轻人少，并且两个年龄组中同句子掩蔽声启动的言语掩蔽释放比不同句子掩蔽声启动的更大。这些结果表明，在嘈杂的聆听条件下，掩蔽声的语音和内容线索均可用于从掩蔽声中释放目标语音。此外，掩蔽声启动引起的言语掩蔽释放存在与年龄相关的下降。
