Tessa Bent

Noise in healthcare settings, such as hospitals, often exceeds levels recommended by health organizations. Although researchers and medical professionals have raised concerns about the effect of these noise levels on spoken communication, objective measures of behavioral intelligibility in hospital noise are lacking. Further, no studies of intelligibility in hospital noise used medically relevant terminology, which may differentially impact intelligibility compared to standard terminology in speech perception research and is essential for ensuring ecological validity. Here, intelligibility was measured using online testing for 69 young adult listeners in three listening conditions (i.e., quiet, speech-shaped noise, and hospital noise: 23 listeners per condition) for four sentence types. Three sentence types included medical terminology with varied lexical frequency and familiarity characteristics. A final sentence set included non-medically related sentences. Results showed that intelligibility was negatively impacted by both noise types with no significant difference between the hospital and speech-shaped noise. Medically related sentences were not less intelligible overall, but word recognition accuracy was significantly positively correlated with both lexical frequency and familiarity. These results support the need for continued research on how noise levels in healthcare settings in concert with less familiar medical terminology impact communications and ultimately health outcomes.

In the 100-level Phonetics for Speech and Hearing Sciences course at Indiana University, students learn articulatory descriptions for the vowels and consonants of American English. I have incorporated activities to help students practice the descriptions and apply them to real-world problems. The activities include: (1) Articulatory description puzzles: Students are given a series

Listeners improve their ability to understand nonnative speech through exposure. The present study examines the role of semantic predictability during adaptation. Listeners were trained on high-predictability, low-predictability, or semantically anomalous sentences. Results demonstrate that trained participants improve their perception of nonnative speech compared to untrained participants. Adaptation is most robust for the types of sentences participants heard during training; however, semantic predictability during exposure did not impact the amount of adaptation overall. Results show advantages in adaptation specific to the type of speech material, a finding similar to the specificity of adaptation previously demonstrated for individual talkers or accents.

School-age children's understanding of unfamiliar accents is not adult-like and the age at which this ability fully matures is unknown. To address this gap, eight- to fifteen-year-old children's (n = 74) understanding of native- and non-native-accented sentences in quiet and noise was assessed. Children's performance was adult-like by eleven to twelve years for the native accent in noise and by fourteen to fifteen years for the non-native accent in quiet. However, fourteen- to fifteen-year old's performance was not adult-like for the non-native accent in noise. Thus, adult-like comprehension of unfamiliar accents may require greater exposure to linguistic variability or additional cognitive–linguistic growth.

Few studies have directly compared adults' or children's perception of nonnative accents and unfamiliar regional dialects. However, some evidence suggests that nonnative varieties cause greater decrements in intelligibility and processing than unfamiliar native dialects, while metalinguistic awareness for nonnative varieties develops earlier than awareness for regional variants. To directly examine regional and nonnative accent perception, we tested sentence recognition in American-English monolingual 5- to 7-year-old children and adults for three accents: Central Midland (familiar native), Scottish (unfamiliar native), and German (detectable but mild nonnative accent) in quiet and multitalker babble. In quiet, both children and adults showed highly accurate word recognition for all accents. Although children's performance was lower than adults’ in noise, overall word recognition accuracy patterns across accents were similar: accuracy was highest for the Midland talker, followed by the German-accented talker, and poorest for the Scottish talker. These data suggest that the greater decrements for nonnative accents compared to unfamiliar regional dialects previously reported may have arisen from the specific varieties or talkers selected. Although both types of unfamiliar speech can cause listening difficulty in noisy environments, the acoustic-phonetic distance from the home dialect may predict both adults' and children's performance better than native vs. nonnative status.

Children’s ability to understand speakers with a wide range of dialects and accents is essential for efficient language development and communication in a global society. Here, the impact of regional dialect and foreign-accent variability on children’s speech understanding was evaluated in both quiet and noisy conditions. Five- to seven-year-old children (n = 90) and adults (n = 96) repeated sentences produced by three speakers with different accents—American English, British English, and Japanese-accented English—in quiet or noisy conditions. Adults had no difficulty understanding any speaker in quiet conditions. Their performance declined for the nonnative speaker with a moderate amount of noise; their performance only substantially declined for the British English speaker (i.e., below 93% correct) when their understanding of the American English speaker was also impeded. In contrast, although children showed accurate word recognition for the American and British English speakers in quiet conditions, they had difficulty understanding the nonnative speaker even under ideal listening conditions. With a moderate amount of noise, their perception of British English speech declined substantially and their ability to understand the nonnative speaker was particularly poor. These results suggest that although school-aged children can understand unfamiliar native dialects under ideal listening conditions, their ability to recognize words in these dialects may be highly susceptible to the influence of environmental degradation. Fully adult-like word identification for speakers with unfamiliar accents and dialects may exhibit a protracted developmental trajectory.

Active-learning classrooms (ALCs) facilitate innovative learner-centered pedagogical approaches. However, ensuring that all students receive appropriate support during learning activities can be challenging. Incorporating teaching assistants (TAs) is one avenue for increasing assistance available to students. Yet, investigations of the interactions among TAs and students in ALCs are lacking. To address this gap, a phonetics course with three TAs was studied. Three class sessions were video taped and students were given surveys to assess their perception of the learning activities and interactions with the TAs. Across sessions, 93% of students reported that their interactions with the TAs allowed them to move forward with the task. Similarly, 89% of students indicated that the TAs were able to guide them to the answer without giving them the answer. The video data suggest that the teaching assistants’ interactions during small group activities differ from the instructors’. During the small group activities, the instructor spent 62% of the time in direct consultation with groups while the TAs only spent 30%. Additional analyses of the video and survey data will inform best practices for incorporating TAs into ALCs. [Work supported by a Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Grant from Indiana University.]

Both environmental noise and talker-related variation (e.g., accented speech) can create adverse listening conditions for speech communication. Individuals recruit additional cognitive, linguistic, or perceptual resources when faced with such challenges, and they vary in their ability to understand degraded speech. However, it is unclear whether listeners employ the same additional resources when encountering different types of challenging listening conditions. In the present study, we compare individuals’ ability on a variety of skills —including vocabulary, selective attention, rhythm perception, and working memory—with transcription accuracy (i.e., intelligibility scores) of speech degraded by the addition of speech-shaped noise or multi-talker babble and/or talker variation (i.e., a non-native speaker). Initial analyses show that intelligibility scores across degradations of the same class (i.e., either environmental or talker-related) significantly correlate, but correlations of intelligibility scores across degradation classes are weaker. The relationship between intelligibility scores and cognitive-linguistic skills is similar, showing that while vocabulary and working memory correlate with multiple degradation types, rhythm perception only correlates with environmental degradations. Taken together, these results indicate that listeners may recruit different resources when faced with different classes of listening challenges.

Children can use sentence context to facilitate their understanding of both native and nonnative speakers and this benefit increases with age. In this study, 5- to 7-year-old children (n = 90) and adults (n = 30) were compared on their ability to benefit from sentence context. In addition, we examined whether receptive vocabulary accounts for variability in spoken word recognition differently for words spoken in sentences versus in isolation. Stimuli were produced by either native- or nonnative-accented (Japanese and Spanish) speakers. Listeners first identified words in isolation that had been extracted from meaningful sentences. Then they completed the NIH Toolbox Picture Vocabulary Test. Finally, they identified the same spoken words embedded in the original sentences. Children and adults showed significant word recognition advantages for the sentence condition compared to the isolated word condition for both native and nonnative speakers. However, adults showed a much larger benefit from sentence context than the children in the nonnative but not the native condition. Further, older children benefited from context more than younger children. Finally, receptive vocabulary was positively correlated with nonnative recognition of words in sentences but not in isolation for both children and adults, suggesting that better receptive vocabulary enhances use of context for nonnative speech.

Speech signals provide both linguistic information (e.g., words and sentences) as well as information about the speaker who produced the message (i.e., social‐indexical information). Listeners store highly detailed representations of these speech signals, which are simultaneously indexed with linguistic and social category membership. A variety of methodologies—forced‐choice categorization, rating, and free classification—have shed light on listeners’ cognitive‐perceptual representations of the social‐indexical information present in the speech signal. Specifically, listeners can accurately identify some talker characteristics, including native language status, approximate age, sex, and gender. Additionally, listeners have sensitivity to other speaker characteristics—such as sexual orientation, regional dialect, native language for non‐native speakers, race, and ethnicity—but listeners tend to be less accurate or more variable at categorizing or rating speakers based on these constructs. However, studies have not necessarily incorporated more recent conceptions of these constructs (e.g., separating listeners’ perceptions of race vs ethnicity) or speakers who do not fit squarely into specific categories (e.g., for sex perception, intersex individuals; for gender perception, genderqueer speakers; for race perception, multiracial speakers). Additional research on how the intersections of social‐indexical categories influence speech perception is also needed. As the field moves forward, scholars from a variety of disciplines should be incorporated into investigations of how listeners’ extract and represent facets of personal identity from speech. Further, the impact of these representations on our interactions with one another in contexts outside of the laboratory should continue to be explored. WIREs Cogn Sci 2017, 8:e1434. doi: 10.1002/wcs.1434This article is categorized under: Linguistics > Language Acquisition Linguistics > Language in Mind and Brain Psychology > Language