Influences of auditory object formation on speech perception.
Barbara G. Shinn‐Cunningham, Dali Wang · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2009
In common social settings, our ears receive a jumbled mixture of sound coming from different sources in different directions. A normal hearing listener is adept at using the low-level acoustic structure in the sound mixture to organize this cacophony into auditory objects, each corresponding to a distinct talker (i.e., performing auditory scene analysis). Typical listeners are also proficient at focusing on the talker of interest and ignoring distracting objects (i.e., directing selective attention to the desired object). Often, despite the efficacy of object formation and selective attention, portions of an attended object are inaudible, masked by sources that overlap the attended source in time and frequency. In such situations, listeners “fill in” the missing speech and extract a meaningful, whole message from the sound mixture, a process known as “phonemic restoration.” This talk will review some recent studies demonstrating that the process of phonemic restoration, which relies on high-level, acquired knowledge about speech structure and meaning, is directly impacted by low-level acoustic attributes that influence auditory grouping. These results demonstrate the inter-connected nature of the high-level processes that allow listeners to communicate in challenging settings.