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Orthographic primes are (nearly) as effective as acoustic ones at clarifying degraded speech
Poster Session B, Wednesday, September 30, 4:30 - 6:30 pm, Wangari Maathai
Andrew Dykstra1, Cameron Grier1, Yunkai Zhu1, Amy Garcia1, Dylan Pearson1; 1University of Central Florida
Speech perception is a fundamental human function that enables verbal communication. Humans’ ability to perceive and recognize speech is thought to rely on both perceptual grouping cues and prior semantic or phonetic knowledge. However, the relative contributions of prior acoustic phonetic and semantic information are not well understood. Here, we used sine-wave speech (SWS) - a degraded speech signal that preserves only the formant structure of natural speech - along with acoustic and orthographic priming to examine the extent to which semantic priming, per se, influences perception of degraded speech signals. Participants listened to monosyllabic SWS words and completed both a two-alternative, forced-choice between target words and phonetically similar foils as well as a perceptual clarity-rating task. We observed a significant increase in both accuracy and clarity rating after both acoustic and orthographic primes, showing that both prime types were effective in enabling SWS perception. However, for both accuracy and clarity ratings, we also observed a significant effect of prime type, indicating that acoustic primes were slightly more effective than orthographic primes at perceptually clarifying SWS. For clarity ratings, we also observed a significant effect of word type, indicating that real words were more easily clarified by priming than pseudo words were. The results indicate that orthographic primes, while not quite as effective as acoustic primes at perceptually clarifying SWS, are nevertheless capable of rendering SWS intelligible. This, combined with the real-versus-pseudo word effect, suggests that both acoustic phonetic and semantic information is utilized in perceptual clarification of degraded speech signals.
Topic Areas: Speech Perception,