Linguistic contributions to speech-on-speech masking for native and non-native listeners: Language familiarity and semantic content

Brouwer, Susanne; Engen, Kristin J. Van; Calandruccio, Lauren; Bradlow, Ann R.

doi:10.1121/1.3675943

Cited by 130 publications

(254 citation statements)

References 42 publications

(63 reference statements)

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“…The listener must also spend more cognitive resources to inhibit irrelevant lexical-semantic information . This might be particularly problematic when the masking speech is in the same language as the target speech, since the masker then will interfere at several different linguistic levels (Brouwer, Van Engen, Calandruccio, & Bradlow, 2012;Tun, O'Kane, & Wingfield, 2002). However, if the masking speech is not in the same native language as the target speech (Ng et al, 2014), and if the nonnative language is linguistically dissimilar the masking effect becomes less pronounced (Brouwer et al, 2012).…”

Section: Listening In Noisementioning

confidence: 99%

“…However, even if ISTS is largely non-intelligible (Holube et al, 2010), it may cause additional informational masking (Francart et al, 2011). Such masking would add to the cognitive load since the masker interferes with the speech material at different linguistic levels (Brouwer et al, 2012;Tun et al, 2002).…”

Section: Sentence Questions and Individual Differences In Cognitive Cmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This might be particularly problematic when the masking speech is in the same language as the target speech, since the masker then will interfere at several different linguistic levels (Brouwer, Van Engen, Calandruccio, & Bradlow, 2012;Tun, O'Kane, & Wingfield, 2002). However, if the masking speech is not in the same native language as the target speech (Ng et al, 2014), and if the nonnative language is linguistically dissimilar the masking effect becomes less pronounced (Brouwer et al, 2012). Two languages that belong to the same language family, will be more alike because these languages will have similar temporal and spectral properties (Calandruccio, Dhar, & Bradlow, 2010).…”

Section: Listening In Noisementioning

confidence: 99%

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Assessing cognitive spare capacity as a measure of listening effort using the Auditory Inference Span Test

Rönnberg¹

2014

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Hearing loss has a negative effect on the daily life of 10-15% of the world’s population. One of the most common ways to treat a hearing loss is to fit hearing aids which increases audibility by providing amplification. Hearing aids thus improve speech reception in quiet, but listening in noise is nevertheless often difficult and stressful. Individual differences in cognitive capacity have been shown to be linked to differences in speech recognition performance in noise. An individual’s cognitive capacity is limited and is gradually consumed by increasing demands when listening in noise. Thus, fewer cognitive resources are left to interpret and process the information conveyed by the speech. Listening effort can therefore be explained by the amount of cognitive resources occupied with speech recognition. A well fitted hearing aid improves speech reception and leads to less listening effort, therefore an objective measure of listening effort would be a useful tool in the hearing aid fitting process. In this thesis the Auditory Inference Span Test (AIST) was developed to assess listening effort by measuring an individual’s cognitive spare capacity, the remaining cognitive resources available to interpret and encode linguistic content of incoming speech input while speech understanding takes place. The AIST is a dual-task hearing-innoise test, combining auditory and memory processing, and requires executive processing of speech at different memory load levels. The AIST was administered to young adults with normal hearing and older adults with hearing impairment. The aims were 1) to develop the AIST; 2) to investigate how different signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) affect memory performance for perceived speech; 3) to explore if this performance would interact with cognitive capacity; 4) to test if different background noise types would interact differently with memory performance for young adults with normal hearing; and 5) to examine if these relationships would generalize to older adults with hearing impairment. The AIST is a new test of cognitive spare capacity which uses existing speech material that is available in several countries, and manipulates simultaneously cognitive load and SNR. Thus, the design of AIST pinpoints potential interactions between auditory and cognitive factors. The main finding of this thesis was the interaction between noise type and SNR showing that decreased SNR reduced cognitive spare capacity more in speech-like noise compared to speech-shaped noise, even though speech intelligibility levels were similar between noise types. This finding applied to young adults with normal hearing but there was a similar effect for older adults with hearing impairment with the addition of background noise compared to no background noise. Task demands, MLLs, interacted with cognitive capacity, thus, individuals with less cognitive capacity were more sensitive to increased cognitive load. However, MLLs did not interact with noise type or with SNR, which shows that different memory load levels were not affe...

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Section: Listening In Noisementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Sentence Questions and Individual Differences In Cognitive Cmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Listening In Noisementioning

confidence: 99%

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Assessing cognitive spare capacity as a measure of listening effort using the Auditory Inference Span Test

Rönnberg¹

2014

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“…When the background contains lexicalsemantic information, it becomes more distracting and harder to separate the target speech from the background speech (Kilman et al, 2013;Rönnberg et al, 2010;Sörqvist & Rönnberg, 2012). Similarly, the linguistic-similarity hypothesis (Brouwer et al, 2012) proposes that the efficiency of auditory stream segregation is related to the similarities between the target and the masker speech. For example, English is more linguistically similar to Dutch than to Mandarin or Korean, so it would be more difficult to extract target speech in English from masker speech in Dutch than from masker speech in Mandarin.…”

Section: Effects Of Noise and Noise Reduction On Memory For Speechmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cognition in Hearing Aid Users: Memory for Everyday Speech

Ng¹

2013

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Hearing impairment interferes with speech communication. Hearing aids are designed to provide amplification for individuals with poor auditory sensitivity. Signal processing algorithms are implemented in hearing aids to further improve speech understanding and to reduce listening effort in noise. When listening effort is reduced, fewer resources are assumed to be needed for speech perception and more resources would thus be freed for cognitive processing of speech. However, this effect has only been reported in young adults with normal hearing, not in hearing aid users. Cognitive abilities, which vary between individuals, have been shown to influence the ability to benefit from hearing aids. Specifically, it is not yet known how individual differences in cognitive abilities interact with signal processing to reduce listening effort. Also, the relationship between cognition and aided speech recognition performance, as a function of acclimatization processes in new hearing aid users, has not been studied previously.This thesis investigated the importance of cognition for speech understanding in experienced and new hearing aid users. Four studies were carried out. In the first three studies (reported in Papers 1 to 3), experienced hearing aid users were tested and the aims were 1) to develop a cognitive test, called the Sentence-final Word Identification and Recall (SWIR) test, to measure the effects of a noise reduction algorithm on processing of highly intelligible speech (everyday sentences). SWIR performance is argued to reflect the amount of remaining resources upon successful speech perception; 2) to investigate, using the SWIR test, whether hearing aid signal processing would affect memory for heard speech; 3) to test whether the effects of signal processing on the ability to recall speech would interact with background noise and individual differences in working memory capacity; and 4) to explore the potential clinical application of the SWIR test by examining the relationship between SWIR performance and self-reported hearing aid outcome. In the fourth study (reported in Paper 4), the aim was 5) to examine the relationship between cognition and speech recognition in noise in new users using various models of hearing aids over the first six months of hearing aid use.Results of the studies reported in Papers 1 and 3 demonstrated that, for experienced users, noise impairs the ability to recall intelligible speech heard in noise. Noise reduction freed up cognitive resources and alleviated the negative impact of noise on memory when speech stimuli were presented in background noise consisting of speech babble spoken in the listener's native language but not in a foreign language. The possible underlying mechanisms are that noise reduction facilitates auditory stream segregation between target and irrelevant speech and reduces the attention captured by the linguistic information in irrelevant speech. In both studies, the effects of noise reduction and SWIR performance were modulated by individual differe...

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“…In the latter case, the competing signal is much more likely to compete with the target speech for the listener's attention, and initiate higherorder, post-lexical processing of the competing speech. For instance, when the language of the competing talker is understood by the listener, it produces a greater degree of interference with speech recognition, comprehension, and memory than when the competing speech is in a language foreign to a listener (Tun, O'Kane, & Wingfield, 2002;Rhebergen., Versfeld,, & Wouter, 2005;Van Engen & Bradlow, 2007;Van Engen, 2010;Brouwer, Van Engen, Calandruccio, & Bradlow, 2012). It also is the case that competing speech in the same language is a less effective masker when it is heavily accented than when it is not (Calandruccio, Dhar, & Bradlow, 2010).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Does increasing the intelligibility of a competing sound source interfere more with speech comprehension in older adults than it does in younger adults?

Daneman

Schneider

2016

Atten Percept Psychophys

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A previous study (Schneider, Daneman, Murphy, & Kwong See, 2000) found that older listeners' decreased ability to recognize individual words in a noisy auditory background was responsible for most, if not all, of the comprehension difficulties older adults experience when listening to a lecture in a background of unintelligible babble. The present study investigated whether the use of a more intelligible distracter (a competing lecture) might reveal an increased susceptibility to distraction in older adults. The results from Experiments 1 and 2 showed that both normal-hearing and hearing-impaired older adults performed poorer than younger adults when everyone was tested in identical listening situations. However, when the listening situation was individually adjusted to compensate for age-related differences in the ability to recognize individual words in noise, age-related difference in comprehension disappeared. Experiment 3 compared the masking effects of a single-talker competing lecture to a babble of 12 voices directly after adjusting for word recognition. The results showed that the competing lecture interfered more than did the babble for both younger and older listeners. Interestingly, an increase in the level of noise had a deleterious effect on listening when the distractor was babble but had no effect when it was a competing lecture. These findings indicated that the speech comprehension difficulties of healthy older adults in noisy backgrounds primarily reflect age-related declines in the ability to recognize individual words.

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Linguistic contributions to speech-on-speech masking for native and non-native listeners: Language familiarity and semantic content

Cited by 130 publications

References 42 publications

Assessing cognitive spare capacity as a measure of listening effort using the Auditory Inference Span Test

Assessing cognitive spare capacity as a measure of listening effort using the Auditory Inference Span Test

Cognition in Hearing Aid Users: Memory for Everyday Speech

Does increasing the intelligibility of a competing sound source interfere more with speech comprehension in older adults than it does in younger adults?

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