Effects of intelligibility on within- and cross-modal sentence recognition memory
Sandie Keerstock, Rajka Smiljanić · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2017
Listener-oriented speaking style adaptations improve sentence recognition memory in quiet and in noise (Van Engen et al. 2012, Gilbert et al. 2014). It is not clear if this advantage arises from the available cognitive resources, or enhanced memory traces. The present study investigated what may underlie the improved recognition memory for clear speech. In the within-modal condition, monolingual English listeners heard a total of 40 unique meaningful sentences in conversational and clear speaking styles, followed by a test phase in which they identified 80 audio sentences as old or new. In the cross-modal condition, the acoustic input in the test phase was replaced by written text. Results showed that while accuracy was high in both conditions, conversational-to-clear speech modifications significantly improved sentence recognition memory only in the within-modal condition. In the cross-modal condition, speaking style had no effect on sentence recognition memory. The results suggest that the benefit of clear speech over conversational speech on recognition memory lies in exaggerated acoustic-phonetic cues whose presence is necessary to activate memory traces. Speaking style adaptations may promote the encoding and storing of lower-level acoustic information rather than higher-level semantic information.