Department of Psychology, Concordia University, Montreal, QC, Canada.
Centre for Research in Brain, Language, and Music, Montreal, QC, Canada.
Trends Hear. 2023 Jan-Dec;27:23312165231181757. doi: 10.1177/23312165231181757.
Auditory memory is an important everyday skill evaluated more and more frequently in clinical settings as there is recently a greater recognition of the cost of hearing loss to cognitive systems. Testing often involves reading a list of unrelated items aloud; but prosodic variations in pitch and timing across the list can affect the number of items remembered. Here, we ran a series of online studies on normally-hearing participants to provide normative data (with a larger and more diverse population than the typical student sample) on a novel protocol characterizing the effects of suprasegmental properties in speech, namely investigating pitch patterns, fast and slow pacing, and interactions between pitch and time grouping. In addition to free recall, and in line with our desire to work eventually with individuals exhibiting more limited cognitive capacity, we included a cued recall task to help participants recover specifically the words forgotten during the free recall part. We replicated key findings from previous research, demonstrating the benefits of slower pacing and of grouping on free recall. However, only slower pacing led to better performance on cued recall, indicating that grouping effects may decay surprisingly fast (over a matter of one minute) compared to the effect of slowed pacing. These results provide a benchmark for future comparisons of short-term recall performance in hearing-impaired listeners and users of cochlear implants.
听觉记忆是一项重要的日常技能，在临床环境中越来越频繁地进行评估，因为最近人们越来越认识到听力损失对认知系统的代价。测试通常涉及大声朗读一系列不相关的项目；但是，列表中音高和时间的韵律变化会影响记住的项目数量。在这里，我们对正常听力的参与者进行了一系列在线研究，提供了关于一种新协议的规范数据（比典型的学生样本更大、更多样化），该协议描述了言语中超音段特征的影响，即研究音高模式、快速和慢速节奏以及音高和时间分组之间的相互作用。除了自由回忆外，为了与认知能力有限的个体合作，我们还包括了提示回忆任务，以帮助参与者恢复自由回忆部分中遗忘的单词。我们复制了先前研究的关键发现，证明了较慢的节奏和分组对自由回忆有好处。然而，只有较慢的节奏才能在提示回忆中取得更好的成绩，这表明与减慢节奏的效果相比，分组效果可能会出人意料地快速衰减（在一分钟内）。这些结果为未来比较听力受损听众和人工耳蜗使用者的短期回忆表现提供了基准。
