The effect of lip-reading on primary stream segregation.
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ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Devergie A
PROVIDER: S-EPMC3155588 | biostudies-other | 2011 Jul
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-other
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Project description:Spatial hearing is widely regarded as helpful in recognizing a sound amid other competing sounds. It is a matter of debate, however, whether spatial cues contribute to "stream segregation," which refers to the specific task of assigning multiple interleaved sequences of sounds to their respective sources. The present study employed "rhythmic masking release" as a measure of the spatial acuity of stream segregation. Listeners discriminated between rhythms of noise-burst sequences presented from free-field targets in the presence of interleaved maskers that varied in location. For broadband sounds in the horizontal plane, target-masker separations of ≥8° permitted rhythm discrimination with d' ≥ 1; in some cases, such thresholds approached listeners' minimum audible angles. Thresholds were the same for low-frequency sounds but were substantially wider for high-frequency sounds, suggesting that interaural delays provided higher spatial acuity in this task than did interaural level differences. In the vertical midline, performance varied dramatically as a function of noise-burst duration with median thresholds ranging from >30° for 10-ms bursts to 7.1° for 40-ms bursts. A marked dissociation between minimum audible angles and masking release thresholds across the various pass-band and burst-duration conditions suggests that location discrimination and spatial stream segregation are mediated by distinct auditory mechanisms.
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Project description:The purpose of this study was to investigate the roles of spectral overlap and amplitude modulation (AM) rate for stream segregation for noise signals, as well as to test the build-up effect based on these two cues. Segregation ability was evaluated using an objective paradigm with listeners' attention focused on stream segregation. Stimulus sequences consisted of two interleaved sets of bandpass noise bursts (A and B bursts). The A and B bursts differed in spectrum, AM-rate, or both. The amount of the difference between the two sets of noise bursts was varied. Long and short sequences were studied to investigate the build-up effect for segregation based on spectral and AM-rate differences. Results showed the following: (1). Stream segregation ability increased with greater spectral separation. (2). Larger AM-rate separations were associated with stronger segregation abilities. (3). Spectral separation was found to elicit the build-up effect for the range of spectral differences assessed in the current study. (4). AM-rate separation interacted with spectral separation suggesting an additive effect of spectral separation and AM-rate separation on segregation build-up. The findings suggest that, when normal-hearing listeners direct their attention towards segregation, they are able to segregate auditory streams based on reduced spectral contrast cues that vary by the amount of spectral overlap. Further, regardless of the spectral separation they are able to use AM-rate difference as a secondary/weaker cue. Based on the spectral differences, listeners can segregate auditory streams better as the listening duration is prolonged-i.e., sparse spectral cues elicit build-up segregation; however, AM-rate differences only appear to elicit build-up when in combination with spectral difference cues.
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Project description:The ability to obtain reliable phonetic information from a talker's face during speech perception is an important skill. However, lip-reading abilities vary considerably across individuals. There is currently a lack of normative data on lip-reading abilities in young normal-hearing listeners. This letter describes results obtained from a visual-only sentence recognition experiment using CUNY sentences and provides the mean number of words correct and the standard deviation for different sentence lengths. Additionally, the method for calculating T-scores is provided to facilitate the conversion between raw and standardized scores. This metric can be utilized by clinicians and researchers in lip-reading studies. This statistic provides a useful benchmark for determining whether an individual's lip-reading score falls within the normal range, or whether it is above or below this range.
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Project description:A procedure to estimate the relative contribution of "A" and "B" tones for a stream-segregation task is described. Listeners detected a delay in the penultimate A tone in an A-B-A-B sequence of tones. For small A-B frequency separations, for most listeners, classification models based on both the A and B tones were superior to models based on just the A tones. For large frequency separations, models based on just the A tones were superior, indicating the A and B tones were segregated. The results also revealed individual differences in the strategies adopted to complete the task.
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Project description:Sequential stream segregation involves the ability of a listener to perceptually segregate two rapidly alternating sounds into different perceptual streams. By studying auditory streaming in cochlear implants (CIs), one can obtain a better understanding of the cues that CI recipients can use to segregate different sound sources, which may have relevance to such everyday activities as the understanding of speech in background noise. This study focuses on the ability of CI users to use temporal periodicity cues to perform auditory stream segregation. A rhythmic discrimination task involving sequences of alternating amplitude-modulated (AM) noises is used. The results suggest that most CI users can stream AM noise bursts at relatively low modulation frequencies (near 80 Hz AM), but that this ability diminishes at higher modulation frequencies. Additionally, the ability of CI users to perform streaming using temporal periodicity cues appears to be comparable to that of normal-hearing listeners. These results imply that CI subjects may in certain contexts (i.e., when the talker has a low fundamental frequency voice) be able to use temporal periodicity cues to segregate and thus understand the voices of competing talkers.
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Project description:Numerous neuroimaging studies demonstrated that the auditory cortex tracks ongoing speech and that, in multi-speaker environments, tracking of the attended speaker is enhanced compared to the other irrelevant speakers. In contrast to speech, multi-instrument music can be appreciated by attending not only on its individual entities (i.e., segregation) but also on multiple instruments simultaneously (i.e., integration). We investigated the neural correlates of these two modes of music listening using electroencephalography (EEG) and sound envelope tracking. To this end, we presented uniquely composed music pieces played by two instruments, a bassoon and a cello, in combination with a previously validated music auditory scene analysis behavioral paradigm (Disbergen et al., 2018). Similar to results obtained through selective listening tasks for speech, relevant instruments could be reconstructed better than irrelevant ones during the segregation task. A delay-specific analysis showed higher reconstruction for the relevant instrument during a middle-latency window for both the bassoon and cello and during a late window for the bassoon. During the integration task, we did not observe significant attentional modulation when reconstructing the overall music envelope. Subsequent analyses indicated that this null result might be due to the heterogeneous strategies listeners employ during the integration task. Overall, our results suggest that subsequent to a common processing stage, top-down modulations consistently enhance the relevant instrument's representation during an instrument segregation task, whereas such an enhancement is not observed during an instrument integration task. These findings extend previous results from speech tracking to the tracking of multi-instrument music and, furthermore, inform current theories on polyphonic music perception.
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Project description:Auditory stream segregation is a perceptual process by which the human auditory system groups sounds from different sources into perceptually meaningful elements (e.g., a voice or a melody). The perceptual segregation of sounds is important, for example, for the understanding of speech in noisy scenarios, a particularly challenging task for listeners with a cochlear implant (CI). It has been suggested that some aspects of stream segregation may be explained by relatively basic neural mechanisms at a cortical level. During the past decades, a variety of models have been proposed to account for the data from stream segregation experiments in normal-hearing (NH) listeners. However, little attention has been given to corresponding findings in CI listeners. The present study investigated whether a neural model of sequential stream segregation, proposed to describe the behavioral effects observed in NH listeners, can account for behavioral data from CI listeners. The model operates on the stimulus features at the cortical level and includes a competition stage between the neuronal units encoding the different percepts. The competition arises from a combination of mutual inhibition, adaptation, and additive noise. The model was found to capture the main trends in the behavioral data from CI listeners, such as the larger probability of a segregated percept with increasing the feature difference between the sounds as well as the build-up effect. Importantly, this was achieved without any modification to the model's competition stage, suggesting that stream segregation could be mediated by a similar mechanism in both groups of listeners.
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