Multilingual speakers can find speech recognition in everyday environments like restaurants and open-plan offices particularly challenging. In a world where speaking multiple languages is increasingly common, effective clinical and educational interventions will require a better understanding of how factors like multilingual contexts and listeners’ language proficiency interact with adverse listening environments. For example, word and phrase recognition is facilitated when competing voices speak different languages. Is this due to a “release from masking” from lower-level acoustic differences between languages and talkers, or higher-level cognitive and linguistic factors? To address this question, we created a “one-man bilingual cocktail party” selective attention task using English and Mandarin speech from one bilingual talker to reduce low-level acoustic cues. In Experiment 1, 58 listeners more accurately recognized English targets when distracting speech was Mandarin compared to English. Bilingual Mandarin–English listeners experienced significantly more interference and intrusions from the Mandarin distractor than did English listeners, exacerbated by challenging target-to-masker ratios. In Experiment 2, 29 Mandarin–English bilingual listeners exhibited linguistic release from masking in both languages. Bilinguals experienced greater release from masking when attending to English, confirming an influence of linguistic knowledge on the “cocktail party” paradigm that is separate from primarily energetic masking effects. Effects of higher-order language processing and expertise emerge only in the most demanding target-to-masker contexts. The “one-man bilingual cocktail party” establishes a useful tool for future investigations and characterization of communication challenges in the large and growing worldwide community of Mandarin–English bilinguals.
The question of whether bilingualism leads to advantages or disadvantages in linguistic abilities has been debated for many years. It is unclear whether growing up with one versus two languages is related to variations in the ability to process speech in the presence of background noise. We present findings from a word recognition and a word learning task with monolingual and bilingual adults. Bilinguals appear to be less accurate than monolinguals at identifying familiar words in the presence of white noise. However, the bilingual “disadvantage” identified during word recognition is not present when listeners were asked to acquire novel word-object relations that were trained either in noise or in quiet. This work suggests that linguistic experience and the demands associated with the type of task both play a role in the ability for listeners to process speech in noise.
more » « less- PAR ID:
- 10546797
- Publisher / Repository:
- SAGE Publications
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Language and Speech
- Volume:
- 63
- Issue:
- 2
- ISSN:
- 0023-8309
- Format(s):
- Medium: X Size: p. 381-403
- Size(s):
- p. 381-403
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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null (Ed.)Human listeners use specific cues to recognize speech and recent experiments have shown that certain time-frequency regions of individual utterances are more important to their correct identification than others. A model that could identify such cues or regions from clean speech would facilitate speech recognition and speech enhancement by focusing on those important regions. Thus, in this paper we present a model that can predict the regions of individual utterances that are important to an automatic speech recognition (ASR) “listener” by learning to add as much noise as possible to these utterances while still permitting the ASR to correctly identify them. This work utilizes a continuous speech recognizer to recognize multi-word utterances and builds upon our previous work that performed the same process for an isolated word recognizer. Our experimental results indicate that our model can apply noise to obscure 90.5% of the spectrogram while leaving recognition performance nearly unchanged.more » « less
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Speech recognition in noisy environments can be challenging and requires listeners to accurately segregate a target speaker from irrelevant background noise. Stochastic figure-ground (SFG) tasks in which temporally coherent inharmonic pure-tones must be identified from a background have been used to probe the non-linguistic auditory stream segregation processes important for speech-in-noise processing. However, little is known about the relationship between performance on SFG tasks and speech-in-noise tasks nor the individual differences that may modulate such relationships. In this study, 37 younger normal-hearing adults performed an SFG task with target figure chords consisting of four, six, eight, or ten temporally coherent tones amongst a background of randomly varying tones. Stimuli were designed to be spectrally and temporally flat. An increased number of temporally coherent tones resulted in higher accuracy and faster reaction times (RTs). For ten target tones, faster RTs were associated with better scores on the Quick Speech-in-Noise task. Individual differences in working memory capacity and self-reported musicianship further modulated these relationships. Overall, results demonstrate that the SFG task could serve as an assessment of auditory stream segregation accuracy and RT that is sensitive to individual differences in cognitive and auditory abilities, even among younger normal-hearing adults.
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The present study examined the role of script in bilingual speech planning by comparing the performance of same and different-script bilinguals. Spanish-English bilinguals (Experiment 1) and Japanese-English bilinguals (Experiment 2) performed a picture-word interference task in which they were asked to name a picture of an object in English, their second language, while ignoring a visual distractor word in Spanish or Japanese, their first language. Results replicated the general pattern seen in previous bilingual picture-word interference studies for the same-script, Spanish-English bilinguals but not for the different-script, Japanese-English bilinguals. Both groups showed translation facilitation, whereas only Spanish-English bilinguals demonstrated semantic interference, phonological facilitation, and phono-translation facilitation. These results suggest that when the script of the language not in use is present in the task, bilinguals appear to exploit the perceptual difference as a language cue to direct lexical access to the intended language earlier in the process of speech planning.more » « less
