Selective spatial attention modulates bottom-up informational masking of speech

Carlile, Simon; Corkhill, Caitlin

doi:10.1038/srep08662

Cited by 25 publications

(21 citation statements)

References 60 publications

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“…Earlier research indicates that selective attention to one speech stream does not mean that humans can completely ignore unattended sounds. Acoustic and linguistic properties of unattended speech can influence attended speech processing, known as informational masking 48,49 or attentional leakage 50 . However, in all these cases, the interference from unattended acoustic and linguistic cues is reduced relative to the contribution of attended speech.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Temporal contrast effects in human speech perception are immune to selective attention

Bosker

Sjerps

Reinisch

2020

Sci Rep

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Two fundamental properties of perception are selective attention and perceptual contrast, but how these two processes interact remains unknown. Does an attended stimulus history exert a larger contrastive influence on the perception of a following target than unattended stimuli? Dutch listeners categorized target sounds with a reduced prefix “ge-” marking tense (e.g., ambiguous between gegaan-gaan “gone-go”). In ‘single talker’ Experiments 1–2, participants perceived the reduced syllable (reporting gegaan) when the target was heard after a fast sentence, but not after a slow sentence (reporting gaan). In ‘selective attention’ Experiments 3–5, participants listened to two simultaneous sentences from two different talkers, followed by the same target sounds, with instructions to attend only one of the two talkers. Critically, the speech rates of attended and unattended talkers were found to equally influence target perception – even when participants could watch the attended talker speak. In fact, participants’ target perception in ‘selective attention’ Experiments 3–5 did not differ from participants who were explicitly instructed to divide their attention equally across the two talkers (Experiment 6). This suggests that contrast effects of speech rate are immune to selective attention, largely operating prior to attentional stream segregation in the auditory processing hierarchy.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Temporal contrast effects in human speech perception are immune to selective attention

Bosker

Sjerps

Reinisch

2020

Sci Rep

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“…Relative to EM, IM has been a challenge to define and is often conceptualized as the interference from noise once EM is accounted for (Cooke et al, 2008). In other words, the definition of IM is primarily a "classification by exclusion" (Carlile & Corkhill, 2015). This study does not suggest that the lexical (i.e., two-talker babble) and nonlexical (i.e., pink noise) distinction is synonymous with the IM and EM distinction, as IM does not mandate the presence of lexical interferences.…”

Section: Potential Implications On the Distinction Of Energetic Maskementioning

confidence: 99%

The Downside of Greater Lexical Influences: Selectively Poorer Speech Perception in Noise

Lam

Xie

Tessmer

et al. 2017

J Speech Lang Hear Res

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,d,e Purpose: Although lexical information influences phoneme perception, the extent to which reliance on lexical information enhances speech processing in challenging listening environments is unclear. We examined the extent to which individual differences in lexical influences on phonemic processing impact speech processing in maskers containing varying degrees of linguistic information (2-talker babble or pink noise). Method: Twenty-nine monolingual English speakers were instructed to ignore the lexical status of spoken syllables (e.g., gift vs. kift) and to only categorize the initial phonemes (/g/ vs. /k/ ). The same participants then performed speech recognition tasks in the presence of 2-talker babble or pink noise in audio-only and audiovisual conditions.Results: Individuals who demonstrated greater lexical influences on phonemic processing experienced greater speech processing difficulties in 2-talker babble than in pink noise. These selective difficulties were present across audio-only and audiovisual conditions. Conclusion: Individuals with greater reliance on lexical processes during speech perception exhibit impaired speech recognition in listening conditions in which competing talkers introduce audible linguistic interferences. Future studies should examine the locus of lexical influences/ interferences on phonemic processing and speechin-speech processing.

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“…Previous research even suggested that selective spatial attention modulated bottom-up informational masking of speech when only the auditory modality was presented 5 . In our study, we further investigate the relationships between the bottom-up mechanisms of multisensory integration and the top-down attentional processes.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Concurrent talking in immersive virtual reality: on the dominance of visual speech cues

González-Franco

Maselli

Florêncio

et al. 2017

Sci Rep

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Humans are good at selectively listening to specific target conversations, even in the presence of multiple concurrent speakers. In our research, we study how auditory-visual cues modulate this selective listening. We do so by using immersive Virtual Reality technologies with spatialized audio. Exposing 32 participants to an Information Masking Task with concurrent speakers, we find significantly more errors in the decision-making processes triggered by asynchronous audiovisual speech cues. More precisely, the results show that lips on the Target speaker matched to a secondary (Mask) speaker’s audio severely increase the participants’ comprehension error rates. In a control experiment (n = 20), we further explore the influences of the visual modality over auditory selective attention. The results show a dominance of visual-speech cues, which effectively turn the Mask into the Target and vice-versa. These results reveal a disruption of selective attention that is triggered by bottom-up multisensory integration. The findings are framed in the sensory perception and cognitive neuroscience theories. The VR setup is validated by replicating previous results in this literature in a supplementary experiment.

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Selective spatial attention modulates bottom-up informational masking of speech

Cited by 25 publications

References 60 publications

Temporal contrast effects in human speech perception are immune to selective attention

Temporal contrast effects in human speech perception are immune to selective attention

The Downside of Greater Lexical Influences: Selectively Poorer Speech Perception in Noise

Concurrent talking in immersive virtual reality: on the dominance of visual speech cues

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