Speech Prosody: The Musical, Magical Quality of Speech

Everhardt, Marita K.; Sarampalis, Anastasios; Coler, Matt; Başkent, Deniz; Lowie, Wander

doi:10.3389/frym.2021.698575

Cited by 10 publications

(16 citation statements)

References 4 publications

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“…The main effects of SNR and processing condition on word and emotion recognition have been documented separately by other studies (e.g., Boothroyd 2008;Everhardt et al 2020). It was, therefore, quite expected that performance declined as SNR worsened from +5 to -5 dB SNR for word recognition and from -5 to -15 dB SNR for emotion recognition.…”

Section: Task Type Processing Condition and Snrsupporting

confidence: 53%

“…Current CI processing strategies focus on preserving the temporal envelope of different frequency bands, which is essential for robust word recognition (Fishman et al 1997;Shannon et al, 1995Shannon et al, , 2004. However, current strategies result in poor spectral resolution, which negatively affects the perception of suprasegmental speech information (for a recent meta-analysis re: the effect of CI processing on lexical and emotional prosody, see Everhardt et al 2020). Recall that accurate perception of suprasegmental speech information is reliant upon the integration of acoustic cues such as the intensity, duration, voice quality, and fundamental frequency (f0) over time.…”

Section: Processing and Simulationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Vocoding speech stimuli allow researchers to be able to test effects of CI processing without physically recruiting individuals with CIs. Vocoded speech is a fairly accurate representation of CI user experience, and previous research has shown that listeners with normal hearing listening to vocoded simulations perform similarly to individuals with CIs on word and prosody recognition tasks (Shannon et al 1995;Everhardt et al 2020), although some studies show differences in performance with individuals with CIs performing poorer than individuals with normal hearing under simulated conditions (e.g., Luo et al 2007). While the effects of CI processing and simulation have been studied for word and emotion recognition separately, very few studies have examined the effects of CI simulation on word and emotion recognition in the same study.…”

Section: Processing and Simulationmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Emotion and Word Recognition for Unprocessed and Vocoded Speech Stimuli

2021

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Objectives: Individuals with cochlear implants (CIs) show reduced word and auditory emotion recognition abilities relative to their peers with normal hearing. Modern CI processing strategies are designed to preserve acoustic cues requisite for word recognition rather than those cues required for accessing other signal information (e.g., talker gender or emotional state). While word recognition is undoubtedly important for communication, the inaccessibility of this additional signal information in speech may lead to negative social experiences and outcomes for individuals with hearing loss. This study aimed to evaluate whether the emphasis on word recognition preservation in CI processing has unintended consequences on the perception of other talker information, such as emotional state. Design: Twenty-four young adult listeners with normal hearing listened to sentences and either reported a target word in each sentence (word recognition task) or selected the emotion of the talker (emotion recognition task) from a list of options (Angry, Calm, Happy, and Sad). Sentences were blocked by task type (emotion recognition versus word recognition) and processing condition (unprocessed versus 8-channel noise vocoder) and presented randomly within the block at three signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) in a background of speech-shaped noise. Confusion matrices showed the number of errors in emotion recognition by listeners. Results: Listeners demonstrated better emotion recognition performance than word recognition performance at the same SNR. Unprocessed speech resulted in higher recognition rates than vocoded stimuli. Recognition performance (for both words and emotions) decreased with worsening SNR. Vocoding speech resulted in a greater negative impact on emotion recognition than it did for word recognition. Conclusions: These data confirm prior work that suggests that in background noise, emotional prosodic information in speech is easier to recognize than word information, even after simulated CI processing. However, emotion recognition may be more negatively impacted by background noise and CI processing than word recognition. Future work could explore CI processing strategies that better encode prosodic information and investigate this effect in individuals with CIs as opposed to vocoded simulation. This study emphasized the need for clinicians to consider not only word recognition but also other aspects of speech that are critical to successful social communication.

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Section: Task Type Processing Condition and Snrsupporting

confidence: 53%

Section: Processing and Simulationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Processing and Simulationmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Emotion and Word Recognition for Unprocessed and Vocoded Speech Stimuli

2021

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“…Catchy utterances, such as proverbs (i.e., “No pain, no gain” in English), verses, and nursery rhymes, contain strong-prosodic (SP) features and are child-friendly in speech repeating and memorizing ( Yuzawa and Saito, 2006 ). Prosodic features can be recognized by the variation in pitch, loudness, and duration ( Everhardt et al, 2022 ) and play an important role in children’s speech development. Behavioral studies found successful prosody perception facilitated children’s speech acquisition in that they used speech prosodic information to segment words ( Jusczyk et al, 1999 ; Johnson and Jusczyk, 2001 ), discriminate emotion ( Scheiner et al, 2006 ; Flom and Bahrick, 2007 ), and eliminate syntactic ambiguity ( Snedeker and Yuan, 2008 ).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Children’s Neural Sensitivity to Prosodic Features of Natural Speech and Its Significance to Speech Development in Cochlear Implanted Children

et al. 2022

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Catchy utterances, such as proverbs, verses, and nursery rhymes (i.e., “No pain, no gain” in English), contain strong-prosodic (SP) features and are child-friendly in repeating and memorizing; yet the way those prosodic features encoded by neural activity and their influence on speech development in children are still largely unknown. Using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), this study investigated the cortical responses to the perception of natural speech sentences with strong/weak-prosodic (SP/WP) features and evaluated the speech communication ability in 21 pre-lingually deaf children with cochlear implantation (CI) and 25 normal hearing (NH) children. A comprehensive evaluation of speech communication ability was conducted on all the participants to explore the potential correlations between neural activities and children’s speech development. The SP information evoked right-lateralized cortical responses across a broad brain network in NH children and facilitated the early integration of linguistic information, highlighting children’s neural sensitivity to natural SP sentences. In contrast, children with CI showed significantly weaker cortical activation and characteristic deficits in speech perception with SP features, suggesting hearing loss at the early age of life, causing significantly impaired sensitivity to prosodic features of sentences. Importantly, the level of neural sensitivity to SP sentences was significantly related to the speech behaviors of all children participants. These findings demonstrate the significance of speech prosodic features in children’s speech development.

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“…However, it is not smaller than that found in the pertinent literature (e.g., N = 8, Luo et al2007). Indeed, in a recent meta-analysis, Everhardt et al (2020) commented that "CI research is typically limited in number of participants" (p. 1092 there). Future studies may wish to tackle the abovementioned issues directly, with a larger group of CI (both bimodal and CI-only) users, controlling for background variability.…”

Section: Limitations and Future Studiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

More Than Words: the Relative Roles of Prosody and Semantics in the Perception of Emotions in Spoken Language by Postlingual Cochlear Implant Users

2022

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Objectives:The processing of emotional speech calls for the perception and integration of semantic and prosodic cues. Although cochlear implants allow for significant auditory improvements, they are limited in the transmission of spectro-temporal fine-structure information that may not support the processing of voice pitch cues. The goal of the current study is to compare the performance of postlingual cochlear implant (CI) users and a matched control group on perception, selective attention, and integration of emotional semantics and prosody.Design: Fifteen CI users and 15 normal hearing (NH) peers (age range, 18-65 years) 1istened to spoken sentences composed of different combinations of four discrete emotions (anger, happiness, sadness, and neutrality) presented in prosodic and semantic channels-T-RES: Test for Rating Emotions in Speech. In three separate tasks, listeners were asked to attend to the sentence as a whole, thus integrating both speech channels (integration), or to focus on one channel only (rating of target emotion) and ignore the other (selective attention). Their task was to rate how much they agreed that the sentence conveyed each of the predefined emotions. In addition, all participants performed standard tests of speech perception. Results: When asked to focus on one channel, semantics or prosody, both groups rated emotions similarly with comparable levels of selective attention. When the task was called for channel integration, group differences were found. CI users appeared to use semantic emotional information more than did their NH peers. CI users assigned higher ratings than did their NH peers to sentences that did not present the target emotion, indicating some degree of confusion. In addition, for CI users, individual differences in speech comprehension over the phone and identification of intonation were significantly related to emotional semantic and prosodic ratings, respectively.Conclusions: CI users and NH controls did not differ in perception of prosodic and semantic emotions and in auditory selective attention. However, when the task called for integration of prosody and semantics, CI users overused the semantic information (as compared with NH). We suggest that as CI users adopt diverse cue weighting strategies with device experience, their weighting of prosody and semantics differs from those used by NH. Finally, CI users may benefit from rehabilitation strategies that strengthen perception of prosodic information to better understand emotional speech.

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Speech Prosody: The Musical, Magical Quality of Speech

Cited by 10 publications

References 4 publications

Emotion and Word Recognition for Unprocessed and Vocoded Speech Stimuli

Emotion and Word Recognition for Unprocessed and Vocoded Speech Stimuli

Children’s Neural Sensitivity to Prosodic Features of Natural Speech and Its Significance to Speech Development in Cochlear Implanted Children

More Than Words: the Relative Roles of Prosody and Semantics in the Perception of Emotions in Spoken Language by Postlingual Cochlear Implant Users

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