Syllable-constituent perception by hearing-aid users: Common factors in quiet and noise

Miller, James D.; Watson, Charles S.; Leek, Marjorie R.; Dubno, Judy R.; Wark, David J.; Souza, Pamela E.; Gordon‐Salant, Sandra; Ahlstrom, Jayne B.

doi:10.1121/1.4979703

Cited by 5 publications

(13 citation statements)

References 19 publications

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“…Results of this study suggest that a thorough understanding of speech perception cannot be achieved by an atomic/reductionist model based on perception of independent units such as consonant and vowel features, or single words. Even though detailed analyses show systematic patterns in the perception of phonetic constituents of isolated syllables (e.g., Dubno & Levitt, 1981 ; Miller et al., 2017 ; Toscano & Allen, 2014 ), the data presented here suggests that other factors contribute meaningfully and can override the perception of phonemes. Many of the patterns in the current study could not emerge without multiword utterances that could potentially have internal coherence or incoherence.…”

Section: Discussioncontrasting

confidence: 70%

Listening Effort Is Not the Same as Speech Intelligibility Score

Winn

Teece

2021

Trends in Hearing

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Listening effort is a valuable and important notion to measure because it is among the primary complaints of people with hearing loss. It is tempting and intuitive to accept speech intelligibility scores as a proxy for listening effort, but this link is likely oversimplified and lacks actionable explanatory power. This study was conducted to explain the mechanisms of listening effort that are not captured by intelligibility scores, using sentence-repetition tasks where specific kinds of mistakes were prospectively planned or analyzed retrospectively. Effort measured as changes in pupil size among 20 listeners with normal hearing and 19 listeners with cochlear implants. Experiment 1 demonstrates that mental correction of misperceived words increases effort even when responses are correct. Experiment 2 shows that for incorrect responses, listening effort is not a function of the proportion of words correct but is rather driven by the types of errors, position of errors within a sentence, and the need to resolve ambiguity, reflecting how easily the listener can make sense of a perception. A simple taxonomy of error types is provided that is both intuitive and consistent with data from these two experiments. The diversity of errors in these experiments implies that speech perception tasks can be designed prospectively to elicit the mistakes that are more closely linked with effort. Although mental corrective action and number of mistakes can scale together in many experiments, it is possible to dissociate them to advance toward a more explanatory (rather than correlational) account of listening effort.

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Section: Discussioncontrasting

confidence: 70%

Listening Effort Is Not the Same as Speech Intelligibility Score

Winn

Teece

2021

Trends in Hearing

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“…Even though detailed analyses show systematic patterns in the perception of phonetic constituents of isolated syllables (e.g. Dubno and Levitt 1981;Toscano & Allen 2014;Miller et al 2017), the data presented here suggests that other factors contribute meaningfully, and can override the perception of phonemes. There was a substantial number of errors that were consistent with the semantics of a sentence but not the phonetics of the misperceived word (Figure 3).…”

Section: Deconstructing the Atomic View Of Speechcontrasting

confidence: 63%

Listening effort is not the same as speech intelligibility score

Winn¹,

Teece²

2020

Preprint

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Speech perception and listening effort are complicated and interrelated concepts. One might assume that intelligibility performance (percent correct) is a proxy for listening effort, but there are some reasons to challenge whether that is actually true. Correct responses in speech perception tests could reflect effortful mental processing, and a completely wrong answer could evoke very little effort, especially if the misperception itself is linguistically well-formed and sensible. This paper presents evidence that listening effort is not a function of the proportion of words correct, but is rather driven by the types of errors, position of errors within a sentence, and the need to resolve ambiguity, reflecting how easily the listener can make sense of a perception. We offer a taxonomy of error types that is both intuitive and also consistent with data from two experiments measuring listening effort with careful controls to either elicit specific kinds of mistakes or to track specific mistakes retrospectively. Participants included individuals with normal hearing or with cochlear implants. In two experiments of sentence repetition, listening effort – indexed by changes in pupil size – was found to scale with the amount of perceptual restoration needed (phoneme versus whole word), and also scale with the sensibility of responses, but not with the number of intelligibility errors. Although mental corrective action and number of mistakes can scale together in many experiments, it is possible to dissociate them in order to advance toward a more explanatory (rather than correlational) account of listening effort.

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“…Rather it describes relations between syllable-constituent perception and sentence perception found after initial training, sufficient only to familiarize the participants with the tasks. The data are for 57 of the 59 hearing-aid users who were tested with the Speech Perception and Assessment Training System (SPATS) as described by Miller et al (2015) and Miller et al (2017). Details of the SPATS testing procedures for constituents and sentences are presented in Secs.…”

Section: A Generalmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…All listeners signed informed consent forms as approved by each site's Institutional Review Board (IRB). The 57 listeners in this study were the same group that participated in the earlier study by Miller et al (2017), except for two listeners that were not given the sentence tests because of procedural errors and were therefore excluded from the analyses presented in this report.…”

Section: Generalmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This approach is described as the syllable-constituent, contextual theory of speech perception and it is applied to data describing the perception of sentences by hearing-aid users. The percentage of correct identifications of 109 syllable constituents (Constituent PC) as described in Miller et al (2017) is a direct measure of the first ability described above. Measures of abilities (2) and (3) above are estimated using the relationships between sentence scores and syllable-constituent scores obtained at differing signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs).…”

Section: Introduction a Generalmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Sentence perception in noise by hearing-aid users predicted by syllable-constituent perception and the use of context

Miller

Watson

Leek

et al. 2020

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

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Masked sentence perception by hearing-aid users is strongly correlated with three variables: (1) the ability to hear phonetic details as estimated by the identification of syllable constituents in quiet or in noise; (2) the ability to use situational context that is extrinsic to the speech signal; and (3) the ability to use inherent context provided by the speech signal itself. This approach is called "the syllable-constituent, contextual theory of speech perception" and is supported by the performance of 57 hearing-aid users in the identification of 109 syllable constituents presented in a background of 12-talker babble and the identification of words in naturally spoken sentences presented in the same babble. A simple mathematical model, inspired in large part by Boothroyd and Nittrouer [(1988). J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 84, 101-114] and Fletcher [Allen (1996) J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 99, 1825-1834], predicts sentence perception from listeners' abilities to recognize isolated syllable constituents and to benefit from context. When the identification accuracy of syllable constituents is greater than about 55%, individual differences in context utilization play a minor role in determining the sentence scores. As syllable-constituent scores fall below 55%, individual differences in context utilization play an increasingly greater role in determining sentence scores. Implications for hearing-aid design goals and fitting procedures are discussed. V

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Syllable-constituent perception by hearing-aid users: Common factors in quiet and noise

Cited by 5 publications

References 19 publications

Listening Effort Is Not the Same as Speech Intelligibility Score

Listening Effort Is Not the Same as Speech Intelligibility Score

Listening effort is not the same as speech intelligibility score

Sentence perception in noise by hearing-aid users predicted by syllable-constituent perception and the use of context

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