Children's syntactic parsing and sentence comprehension with a degraded auditory signal

Abstract

During sentence comprehension, young children anticipate syntactic structures using early-arriving words and have difficulties revising incorrect predictions using late-arriving words. However, nearly all work to date has focused on syntactic parsing in idealized speech environments, and little is known about how children's strategies for predicting and revising meanings are affected by signal degradation. This study compares comprehension of active and passive sentences in natural and vocoded speech. In a word-interpretation task, 5-year-olds inferred the meanings of novel words in sentences that (1) encouraged agent-first predictions (e.g., The blicket is eating the seal implies The blicket is the agent), (2) required revising predictions (e.g., The blicket is eaten by the seal implies The blicket is the theme), or (3) weakened predictions by placing familiar nouns in sentence-initial position (e.g., The seal is eating/eaten by the blicket). When novel words promoted agent-first predictions, children misinterpreted passives as actives, and errors increased with vocoded compared to natural speech. However, when familiar words were sentence-initial that weakened agent-first predictions, children accurately interpreted passives, with no signal-degradation effects. This demonstrates that signal quality interacts with interpretive processes during sentence comprehension, and the impacts of speech degradation are greatest when late-arriving information conflicts with predictions.

How to vocode: Using channel vocoders for cochlear-implant research

“…A handful of simulation studies with children have used vocoders to examine how access to spectral and temporal components of the signal that are typically not present in the implant's signal might improve certain aspects of speech recognition and even sentence processing (Martin et al, 2022) , 2013). Specifically, in word recognition tasks, toddler's performance asymptotes after 8 noise-vocoded channels, with variable recognition at 4 channels, and word recognition failure at 2 channels.…”

Who “it” is influences what “it” does: Discourse effects on children's syntactic parsing

“…Similarly, when English‐speaking 5‐year‐olds recruit the agent‐first bias, this leads to accurate comprehension of actives but difficulties with passives (Huang & Arnold, 2016). Importantly, when speech signals are acoustically distorted to simulate listening through cochlear implants, accuracy remains high with actives but worsens with passives (Martin, Goupell, & Huang, in press). Together, this suggests that diverse aspects of communicative contexts can generate interpretive uncertainty (e.g., unfamiliar words, acoustic degradation), which in turn can increase reliance on canonical parsing cues.…”