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1. A one-man bilingual cocktail party: linguistic and non-linguistic effects on bilinguals’ speech recognition in Mandarin and English

   https://doi.org/10.1186/s41235-024-00562-w  

   Smith, Erin D; Holt, Lori L; Dick, Frederic (December 2024, Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications)

   Abstract 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. 

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2. Subcortical responses to music and speech are alike while cortical responses diverge

   https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-50438-0  

   Shan, Tong; Cappelloni, Madeline S; Maddox, Ross K (January 2024, Scientific Reports)

   Music and speech are encountered daily and are unique to human beings. Both are transformed by the auditory pathway from an initial acoustical encoding to higher level cognition. Studies of cortex have revealed distinct brain responses to music and speech, but differences may emerge in the cortex or may be inherited from different subcortical encoding. In the first part of this study, we derived the human auditory brainstem response (ABR), a measure of subcortical encoding, to recorded music and speech using two analysis methods. The first method, described previously and acoustically based, yielded very different ABRs between the two sound classes. The second method, however, developed here and based on a physiological model of the auditory periphery, gave highly correlated responses to music and speech. We determined the superiority of the second method through several metrics, suggesting there is no appreciable impact of stimulus class (i.e., music vs speech) on the way stimulus acoustics are encoded subcortically. In this study’s second part, we considered the cortex. Our new analysis method resulted in cortical music and speech responses becoming more similar but with remaining differences. The subcortical and cortical results taken together suggest that there is evidence for stimulus-class dependent processing of music and speech at the cortical but not subcortical level. 

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3. Expecting a challenge: A behavioral and neurophysiological investigation of talker identity in cross-dialectal speech perception

   https://doi.org/10.16995/labphon.19053  

   Zaharchuk, Holly; Walker, Abby; Miller, Adrianna; Fernandez, Carla; Van_Hell, Janet (March 2026, Laboratory Phonology)

   Holliday, Jeff; Lee-KIm, Sang-Im; Cho, Taehong (Ed.)

   Listeners use their knowledge about a talker to guide speech perception. In the present study, we manipulated both the familiarity and predictability of this talker-specific knowledge. Twenty-two listeners from western Pennsylvania completed an audio-visual lexical decision task while EEG was recorded. Critically, listeners were introduced to the talkers beforehand, with short videos establishing the talker’s U.S. English accent identity: Mainstream, more similar to the participants themselves; Southern, a relatively less familiar variety; and Unpredictable, which switched between Mainstream and Southern accents. During the task, listeners watched these talkers produce tokens with accents that either aligned with or violated their accent identity. Behaviorally, alignment between talker and token accent influenced performance on Southern-accented tokens, while accuracy on Mainstream-accented tokens was nearly at ceiling regardless of talker accent identity. Neurally, accent familiarity had the largest effect pre-speech (in response to the visual presentation of the talker), while both predictability and familiarity impacted processing of the speech signal itself. Overall, our results suggest that listeners use information about a talker’s accent, even when it is unfamiliar or unpredictable, to alter their listening strategies for more successful speech recognition. 

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4. Effects of experience on recognition of speech produced with a face mask

   https://doi.org/10.1186/s41235-022-00388-4  

   Crinnion, Anne Marie; Toscano, Joseph C.; Toscano, Cheyenne M. (December 2022, Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications)

   Abstract Over the past two years, face masks have been a critical tool for preventing the spread of COVID-19. While previous studies have examined the effects of masks on speech recognition, much of this work was conducted early in the pandemic. Given that human listeners are able to adapt to a wide variety of novel contexts in speech perception, an open question concerns the extent to which listeners have adapted to masked speech during the pandemic. In order to evaluate this, we replicated Toscano and Toscano (PLOS ONE 16(2):e0246842, 2021), looking at the effects of several types of face masks on speech recognition in different levels of multi-talker babble noise. We also examined the effects of listeners’ self-reported frequency of encounters with masked speech and the effects of the implementation of public mask mandates on speech recognition. Overall, we found that listeners’ performance in the current experiment (with data collected in 2021) was similar to that of listeners in Toscano and Toscano (with data collected in 2020) and that performance did not differ based on mask experience. These findings suggest that listeners may have already adapted to masked speech by the time data were collected in 2020, are unable to adapt to masked speech, require additional context to be able to adapt, or that talkers also changed their productions over time. Implications for theories of perceptual learning in speech are discussed. 

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5. Talker-specific perceptual adaptation to second-language speech-in-noise: Tuning-in to the talker while tuning-out the noise

   https://doi.org/10.1121/10.0036844  

   Kim, Seung-Eun; Goldrick, Matthew; Bradlow, Ann R (June 2025, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America)

   When listeners encounter a difficult-to-understand talker in a difficult-to-understand situation, their perceptual mechanisms can adapt, making the talker in the situation easier to understand. This study examined talker-specific perceptual adaptation experimentally by embedding speech from second-language (L2) English talkers in varying levels of noise and collecting transcriptions from first-language English listeners (ten talkers, 100 listeners per experiment). Experiments 1 and 2 demonstrated that prior experience with a L2 talker's speech presented first without noise and then with gradually increasing levels of noise facilitated recognition of that talker in loud noise. Experiment 3 tested whether adaptation is driven by tuning-in to the talker's voice and speech patterns, by examining recognition of speech-in-loud-noise following experience with the talker in quiet. Finally, experiment 4 tested whether adaptation is driven by tuning-out the background noise, by measuring speech-in-loud-noise recognition after experience with the talker in consistently loud noise. The results showed that both tuning-in to the talker and tuning-out the noise contribute to talker-specific perceptual adaptation to L2 speech-in-noise. 

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