Recognition of interrupted words in isolation and in sentences
Gary R. Kidd, Larry E. Humes · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2016
When listening to speech in the presence of competing sounds that render portions of a speech signal inaudible or unrecognizable, the ability to utilize partial speech information is crucial for speech understanding. To better understand this ability, we have been examining word recognition with different patterns of missing information (portions of speech replaced by silence) in words and sentences. Although we find that the major determinant of word recognition is the proportion of missing information, the location of glimpses and the pattern and predictability of glimpses can also influence performance. However, these effects depend on the presence or absence of a sentence context and the predictability of the target word within the sentence. With isolated words, the onset information is most important for recognition. For words in sentences, the importance of word onsets is diminished and depends on the amount of context provided by the sentence. When the pattern of interruptions throughout a sentence is manipulated, a predictable pattern of glimpses facilitates word recognition in a highly predictable sentence context, but not in a low-predictable context. The implications of these findings for theories of speech understanding under difficult listening conditions will be discussed. [Work supported by NIH (NIA and NIDCD).]