The role of syntax in maintaining the integrity of streams of speech
Gerald D. Kidd, Christine R. Mason, Virginia Best · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2013
This study examined the ability of listeners to utilize syntactic structure to extract a target stream of speech from among competing sounds. Target talkers were identified by voice or location, which was held constant throughout an utterance, and were constructed to have either correct syntax or random word order. Both voice and location provided reliable cues for identifying target speech even when other features varied unpredictably. The target sentences were masked either by predominantly energetic maskers (noise) or by highly uncertain informational maskers (similar speech in random word order). When the maskers were noise bursts, target sentence syntax had relatively minor effects on identification performance. However, when the maskers were other utterances, target sentence syntax resulted in significantly better speech identification performance. In addition, conformance to correct syntax alone was sufficient to accurately identify the target speech. The results were interpreted as support for the idea that the predictability of the elements comprising streams of speech, as manifested by syntactic structure, is an important factor in binding words together into coherent streams. Furthermore, these findings suggest that predictability is particularly important for maintaining the coherence of an auditory stream over time under conditions high in informational masking.