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Individual differences in language ability are related to variation in word recognition, not speech perception: evidence from eye movements.

ABSTRACT: The authors examined speech perception deficits associated with individual differences in language ability, contrasting auditory, phonological, or lexical accounts by asking whether lexical competition is differentially sensitive to fine-grained acoustic variation.Adolescents with a range of language abilities (N = 74, including 35 impaired) participated in an experiment based on McMurray, Tanenhaus, and Aslin (2002). Participants heard tokens from six 9-step voice onset time (VOT) continua spanning 2 words (beach/peach, beak/peak, etc.) while viewing a screen containing pictures of those words and 2 unrelated objects. Participants selected the referent while eye movements to each picture were monitored as a measure of lexical activation. Fixations were examined as a function of both VOT and language ability.Eye movements were sensitive to within-category VOT differences: As VOT approached the boundary, listeners made more fixations to the competing word. This did not interact with language ability, suggesting that language impairment is not associated with differential auditory sensitivity or phonetic categorization. Listeners with poorer language skills showed heightened competitors fixations overall, suggesting a deficit in lexical processes.Language impairment may be better characterized by a deficit in lexical competition (inability to suppress competing words), rather than differences in phonological categorization or auditory abilities.

SUBMITTER: McMurray B

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4126886 | biostudies-literature | 2014 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Individual differences in language ability are related to variation in word recognition, not speech perception: evidence from eye movements.

McMurray Bob B Munson Cheyenne C Tomblin J Bruce JB

Journal of speech, language, and hearing research : JSLHR 20140801 4

<h4>Purpose</h4>The authors examined speech perception deficits associated with individual differences in language ability, contrasting auditory, phonological, or lexical accounts by asking whether lexical competition is differentially sensitive to fine-grained acoustic variation.<h4>Method</h4>Adolescents with a range of language abilities (N = 74, including 35 impaired) participated in an experiment based on McMurray, Tanenhaus, and Aslin (2002). Participants heard tokens from six 9-step voice ...[more]

PMID: 24687026

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Project description:ImportanceCochlear implantation is highly effective at improving hearing outcomes, but results have been limited to groupwise analysis. That is, limited data are available for individual patients that report comparisons of preoperative aided speech recognition and postimplantation speech recognition.ObjectiveTo assess changes in preoperative aided vs postoperative speech recognition scores for individual patients receiving cochlear implants when considering the measurement error for each speech recognition test.Design, setting, and participantsThis cross-sectional study used a prospectively maintained database of patients who received cochlear implants between January 1, 2012, and December 31, 2017, at a tertiary, university-based referral center. Adults with bilateral sensorineural hearing loss undergoing cochlear implantation with 6- or 12-month postoperative measures using 1 or more speech recognition tests were studied.ExposuresCochlear implantation.Main outcomes and measuresPostoperative word recognition (consonant-nucleus-consonant word test), sentence recognition (AzBio sentences in quiet), and sentence recognition in noise (AzBio sentences in +10-dB signal-to-noise ratio) scores, and association of each speech recognition score change with aided preoperative score to each test's measurement error.ResultsAnalysis of data from a total of 470 implants from 323 patients included 253 male (53.8%) patients; the mean (SD) age was 61.2 (18.3) years. Most patients had statistically significant improvement in all speech recognition tests postoperatively beyond measurement error, including 262 (84.8%) for word recognition, 226 (87.6%) for sentence recognition, and 33 (78.6%) for sentence recognition in noise. A small number of patients had equivalent preoperative and postoperative scores, including 45 (14.5%) for word recognition, 28 (10.9%) for sentence recognition, and 9 (21.4%) for sentence recognition in noise. Four patients (1.6%) had significantly poorer scores in sentence recognition after implantation. The associations between age at implantation and change in speech recognition scores were -0.12 (95% CI, -0.23 to -0.01) for word recognition, -0.22 (95% CI, -0.34 to -0.10) for sentence recognition, and -0.10 (95% CI, -0.39 to 0.21) for sentence recognition in noise. Patients with no significant improvement were similarly distributed between all preoperative aided speech scores for word recognition (range, 0%-58%) and sentence recognition (range, 0%-56%) testing.Conclusions and relevanceIn this cross-sectional study, with respect to preoperative aided speech recognition, postoperative cochlear implant outcomes for individual patients were largely encouraging. However, improvements in scores for individual patients remained highly variable, which may not be adequately represented in groupwise analyses and reporting of mean scores. Presenting individual patient data from a large sample of individuals with cochlear implants provides a better understanding of individual differences in speech recognition outcomes and contributes to more complete interpretations of successful outcomes after cochlear implantation.

Project description:Spoken word recognition involves a perceptual tradeoff between the reliance on the incoming acoustic signal and knowledge about likely sound categories and their co-occurrences as words. This study examined how adult second language (L2) learners navigate between acoustic-based and knowledge-based spoken word recognition when listening to highly variable, multi-talker truncated speech, and whether this perceptual tradeoff changes as L2 listeners gradually become more proficient in their L2 after multiple months of structured classroom learning. First language (L1) Mandarin Chinese listeners and L1 English-L2 Mandarin adult listeners took part in a gating experiment. The L2 listeners were tested twice - once at the start of their intermediate/advanced L2 language class and again 2 months later. L1 listeners were only tested once. Participants were asked to identify syllable-tone words that varied in syllable token frequency (high/low according to a spoken word corpus) and syllable-conditioned tonal probability (most probable/least probable in speech given the syllable). The stimuli were recorded by 16 different talkers and presented at eight gates ranging from onset-only (gate 1) through onset +40 ms increments (gates 2 through 7) to the full word (gate 8). Mixed-effects regression modeling was used to compare performance to our previous study which used single-talker stimuli (Wiener et al., 2019). The results indicated that multi-talker speech caused both L1 and L2 listeners to rely greater on knowledge-based processing of tone. L1 listeners were able to draw on distributional knowledge of syllable-tone probabilities in early gates and switch to predominantly acoustic-based processing when more of the signal was available. In contrast, L2 listeners, with their limited experience with talker range normalization, were less able to effectively transition from probability-based to acoustic-based processing. Moreover, for the L2 listeners, the reliance on such distributional information for spoken word recognition appeared to be conditioned by the nature of the acoustic signal. Single-talker speech did not result in the same pattern of probability-based tone processing, suggesting that knowledge-based processing of L2 speech may only occur under certain acoustic conditions, such as multi-talker speech.

Dataset Information

Individual differences in language ability are related to variation in word recognition, not speech perception: evidence from eye movements.

Publications

Individual differences in language ability are related to variation in word recognition, not speech perception: evidence from eye movements.

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