Mandarin-Speaking Children’s Speech Recognition: Developmental Changes in the Influences of Semantic Context and F0 Contours

Abstract

The goal of this developmental speech perception study was to assess whether and how age group modulated the influences of high-level semantic context and low-level fundamental frequency (F0) contours on the recognition of Mandarin speech by elementary and middle-school-aged children in quiet and interference backgrounds. The results revealed different patterns for semantic and F0 information. One the one hand, age group modulated significantly the use of F0 contours, indicating that elementary school children relied more on natural F0 contours than middle school children during Mandarin speech recognition. On the other hand, there was no significant modulation effect of age group on semantic context, indicating that children of both age groups used semantic context to assist speech recognition to a similar extent. Furthermore, the significant modulation effect of age group on the interaction between F0 contours and semantic context revealed that younger children could not make better use of semantic context in recognizing speech with flat F0 contours compared with natural F0 contours, while older children could benefit from semantic context even when natural F0 contours were altered, thus confirming the important role of F0 contours in Mandarin speech recognition by elementary school children. The developmental changes in the effects of high-level semantic and low-level F0 information on speech recognition might reflect the differences in auditory and cognitive resources associated with processing of the two types of information in speech perception.

Sentence Context Differentially Modulates Contributions of Fundamental Frequency Contours to Word Recognition in Chinese-Speaking Children With and Without Dyslexia

“…The speech materials were used in our previous studies with native Japanese speakers learning Chinese as a foreign language ( Zhang et al, 2016 ) and Chinese school-age children ( Zhou et al, 2017 ). Cronbach’s alpha values ranged from 0.81 to 0.89 for different types of stimuli in all the studies including the present one, reflecting high internal consistency of each type of stimuli.…”

“…The experimental protocol followed our previous studies ( Wang et al, 2013 ; Zhou et al, 2017 ). In a quiet room with ambient noise level no higher than 15 dB sound pressure level, children listened to the stimuli and were required to report orally what they heard.…”

“…The aim of the present study was to explore the effects of semantic context and F 0 contours on word recognition against interfering speech by comparing Chinese-speaking dyslexic children with chronological age-matched controls. The experiment followed the design of our previous speech intelligibility studies ( Jiang et al, 2017 ; Zhou et al, 2017 ) by manipulating two factors, namely, semantic context (normal sentence versus wordlist sentence) and F 0 contours (utterances with natural versus flat contours). One possible outcome is that semantic context might be similarly used by dyslexic and non-dyslexic children to aid word recognition regardless of the acoustic manipulation.…”

How Visual Word Decoding and Context-driven Auditory Semantic Integration Contribute to Reading: A Test of Additive vs. Multiplicative Models

“…By contrast, children aged 8-10 years required shorter portions of the target words (i.e., less acoustic-phonetic information) for recognition in high-predictability than in low-predictability sentences (Craig et al, 1993). Our previous study (Zhou et al, 2017) showed that elementary school children aged 10 years could not make better use of semantic context in recognizing speech with flattened fundamental frequency (F0) contours compared to speech with natural F0 contours. By contrast, middle school children aged 14 years benefited more from semantic context when natural F0 contours were altered regardless of whether the spoken sentences were presented in quiet or suboptimal listening backgrounds.…”

“…Specifically, to assess the role of contextual semantic integration in speech recognition, we introduced acoustic manipulations in two speech-in-noise conditions, one with natural F0 contours kept in the target sentences presented against interfering background speech and the other with flattened F0 contour that disrupted the critical cue for Chinese lexical tones for proper word recognition. This speech-in-noise test protocol with Mandarin Chinese materials had been previously adopted in a number of studies on elementary school students, middle school students, and adults including the elderly population (Wang et al, 2013;Jiang et al, 2017;Zhou et al, 2017), and the results demonstrated that greater auditory semantic integration at the sentence level is required to recognize the words in the F0-degraded condition. Furthermore, two statistical models, i.e., the multiplicative model (product of the two subskills) and additive model (sum of the two subskills), were tested to clarify how the subskills would predict the variance in reading comprehension.…”