Effects of speech-rhythm disruption on selective listening with a single background talker

Abstract

Recent work by McAuley et al. (Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, 82, 3222-3233, 2020) using the Coordinate Response Measure (CRM) paradigm with a multitalker background revealed that altering the natural rhythm of target speech amidst background speech worsens target recognition (a target-rhythm effect), while altering background speech rhythm improves target recognition (a background-rhythm effect). Here, we used a single-talker background to examine the role of specific properties of target and background sound patterns on selective listening without the complexity of multiple background stimuli. Experiment 1 manipulated the sex of the background talker, presented with a male target talker, to assess target and backgroundrhythm effects with and without a strong pitch cue to aid perceptual segregation. Experiment 2 used a vocoded single-talker background to examine target and background-rhythm effects with envelope-based speech rhythms preserved, but without semantic content or temporal fine structure. While a target-rhythm effect was present with all backgrounds, the backgroundrhythm effect was only observed for the same-sex background condition. Results provide additional support for a selective entrainment hypothesis, while also showing that the background-rhythm effect is not driven by envelope-based speech rhythm alone, and may be reduced or eliminated when pitch or other acoustic differences provide a strong basis for selective listening.

Auditory rhythm facilitates perception and action in children at risk for Developmental Coordination Disorder

“…Intrusion errors were de ned as trials where the participants' responses were words from one of the two background sentences instead of the target sentence. These trials re ect poor attention at the critical locations in time [44]. A 2x2 mixed-design ANOVA on proportion of colour intrusions revealed a signi cant effect of group, F(1,40) = 4.52, p = .040, η 2 = .05; although the TD group had fewer colour response errors, a higher proportion of these errors were intrusions compared to the rDCD group (Fig.…”

“…Speci cally, we used a task in which children identi ed key words in target sentences (among distractor sentences) when the sentences were normally timed and when their timing was modulated. Adults perform worse on this task when the speech rhythms are modulated [43,44], as rhythm provides a temporal cue for where to focus attention when identifying target words. However, the degree to which their performance suffers can be a measure of how exible they are in adjusting to modulated rhythmic cues.…”

Electronic Toys Decrease the Quantity and Lexical Diversity of Spoken Language Produced by Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder and Age-Matched Children With Typical Development

“…Additional research is needed to determine whether electronic toys disrupt play-based language learning opportunities in other ways. The background noise introduced by electronic toys may make it more difficult for children to understand spoken language, especially when it incorporates speech or other rhythmic sounds (Baker and Holding, 1993;Kirkorian et al, 2009;McMillan and Saffran, 2016;Erickson and Newman, 2017;Godwin et al, 2018;McAuley et al, 2020McAuley et al, , 2021. In addition, the salient visual features of electronic toys, such as flashing lights, may compete with other relevant aspects of the child's visual environment (Radesky and Christakis, 2016).…”

Recognition of musical beat and style and applications in interactive humanoid robot

“…The original signal is pre-processed in the training stage, and then the improved RNN is trained using the pre-processed data. In the testing stage, the audio to be tested is first pre-processed by simple data, and then the feature file is transformed (Mcauley et al, 2021 ; Wang et al, 2021 ).…”