Selective Auditory Attention in Adults: Effects of Rhythmic Structure of the Competing Language

Reel, Leigh Ann; Hicks, Candace Bourland

doi:10.1044/1092-4388(2011/10-0193)

Cited by 9 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 49 publications

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“…When the masking speech is spoken in a language with a rhythm similar to that of the target, such as Dutch and English (Freyman et al 2001;Tun et al 2002), native and non-native maskers are equally effective. Reel and Hicks (2012) confirmed that this rhythm effect is independent of listeners' familiarity with the language of the masker. Reel and Hicks (2012) confirmed that this rhythm effect is independent of listeners' familiarity with the language of the masker.…”

Section: Previous Researchsupporting

confidence: 57%

“…Although they did not control for differences in intonation, Reel and Hicks (2012) provided evidence suggesting that differences in rhythm between target and masker language provide partial release from masking regardless of familiarity with the target language. Time-reversed distracting speech will presumably be a less effective masker due to a complete release from informational masking because time-reversed speech is not intelligible.…”

Section: Hypothesesmentioning

confidence: 96%

“…The hypothesis follows from Reel and Hicks's (2012) results, which suggested that it is easier to attend to one of two simultaneous speakers when target and masker are spoken in languages that differ in speech rhythm. The hypothesis is that if target and masker use the same rhythm, it is more difficult to attend to the target than if there are differences in speech rhythm.…”

Section: Hypothesesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Speech Rhythm in Varieties of English

Fuchs¹

2016

Prosody, Phonology and Phonetics

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The series will publish studies in the general area of Speech Prosody with a particular (but non-exclusive) focus on the importance of phonetics and phonology in this field. The topic of speech prosody is today a far larger area of research than is often realised. The number of papers on the topic presented at large international conferences such as Interspeech and ICPhS is considerable and regularly increasing. The proposed book series would be the natural place to publish extended versions of papers presented at the Speech Prosody Conferences, in particular the papers presented in Special Sessions at the conference. This could potentially involve the publication of 3 or 4 volumes every two years ensuring a stable future for the book series. If such publications are produced fairly rapidly, they will in turn provide a strong incentive for the organisation of other special sessions at future Speech Prosody conferences.More information about this series at

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Section: Previous Researchsupporting

confidence: 57%

Section: Hypothesesmentioning

confidence: 96%

Section: Hypothesesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Speech Rhythm in Varieties of English

Fuchs¹

2016

Prosody, Phonology and Phonetics

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“…Mandarin is a syllable-timed language (Lin and Wang, 2005). Reel (2009) reported that speech maskers were less effective when the masking speech was dissimilar in terms of rhythmic structure relative to the target speech, especially when the rhythm class of the masker was unknown to the listener. Therefore, the differences in rhythm between the maskers relative to the target English speech may also have contributed to the Mandarin masker being the least effective speech masker.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Masking Release Due to Linguistic and Phonetic Dissimilarity Between the Target and Masker Speech

et al. 2013

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Purpose To investigate masking release for speech maskers for linguistically and phonetically close (English and Dutch) and distant (English and Mandarin) language pairs. Method Twenty monolingual speakers of English with normal-audiometric thresholds participated. Data are reported for an English sentence recognition task in English, Dutch and Mandarin competing speech maskers (Experiment I) and noise maskers (Experiment II) that were matched either to the long-term-average-speech spectra or to the temporal modulations of the speech maskers from Experiment I. Results Results indicated that listener performance increased as the target-to-masker linguistic distance increased (English-in-English < English-in-Dutch < English-in-Mandarin). Conclusions Spectral differences between maskers can account for some, but not all, of the variation in performance between maskers; however, temporal differences did not seem to play a significant role.

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“…Second, this observation suggests that these different levels will interfere depending on their availability at the cognitive level, such that higher-order interference disappears when the SNR becomes null. Additionally, this depends on the task being use, as higher-order (phonological/lexical) interference is mainly observed in the intelligibility task, whereas lower-order (acoustic/prosodic) interference plays a major role in the lexical decision task (see [26] for data on language rhythm).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Let's All Speak Together! Exploring the Masking Effects of Various Languages on Spoken Word Identification in Multi-Linguistic Babble

2013

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This study aimed to characterize the linguistic interference that occurs during speech-in-speech comprehension by combining offline and online measures, which included an intelligibility task (at a −5 dB Signal-to-Noise Ratio) and 2 lexical decision tasks (at a −5 dB and 0 dB SNR) that were performed with French spoken target words. In these 3 experiments we always compared the masking effects of speech backgrounds (i.e., 4-talker babble) that were produced in the same language as the target language (i.e., French) or in unknown foreign languages (i.e., Irish and Italian) to the masking effects of corresponding non-speech backgrounds (i.e., speech-derived fluctuating noise). The fluctuating noise contained similar spectro-temporal information as babble but lacked linguistic information. At −5 dB SNR, both tasks revealed significantly divergent results between the unknown languages (i.e., Irish and Italian) with Italian and French hindering French target word identification to a similar extent, whereas Irish led to significantly better performances on these tasks. By comparing the performances obtained with speech and fluctuating noise backgrounds, we were able to evaluate the effect of each language. The intelligibility task showed a significant difference between babble and fluctuating noise for French, Irish and Italian, suggesting acoustic and linguistic effects for each language. However, the lexical decision task, which reduces the effect of post-lexical interference, appeared to be more accurate, as it only revealed a linguistic effect for French. Thus, although French and Italian had equivalent masking effects on French word identification, the nature of their interference was different. This finding suggests that the differences observed between the masking effects of Italian and Irish can be explained at an acoustic level but not at a linguistic level.

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Selective Auditory Attention in Adults: Effects of Rhythmic Structure of the Competing Language

Cited by 9 publications

References 49 publications

Speech Rhythm in Varieties of English

Speech Rhythm in Varieties of English

Masking Release Due to Linguistic and Phonetic Dissimilarity Between the Target and Masker Speech

Let's All Speak Together! Exploring the Masking Effects of Various Languages on Spoken Word Identification in Multi-Linguistic Babble

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