Tailored perception: listeners’ strategies for perceiving speech fit their individual perceptual abilities

Abstract

Communicative auditory signals express their structure through acoustic dimensions such as pitch and timing. Individuals' abilities to perceive these dimensions vary widely, and yet most people seem to comprehend music and speech easily. How?Here we tested whether redundancy -multiple acoustic cues indexing the same feature -makes music and speech robust to such individual differences. A model population with a severe and specific deficit for perceiving pitch (congenital amusics) and controls completed 3 tasks, each testing whether they could take advantage of redundancy. In each task, performance relied on either pitch or duration perception alone, or both together redundantly. Results showed that when redundant cues are present, even people with a severe deficit for one type of cue can rely on another to improve their performance. This suggests that redundancy may be a design feature of music and language, one that assures transmission between people with diverse perceptual abilities.not peer-reviewed)

Gorilla in our midst: An online behavioral experiment builder

“…By lowering the barrier, Gorilla aims to make online experiments available and transparent at all levels of ability. Currently, experiments have been conducted in Gorilla on a wide variety of topics, including cross-lingual priming (Poort & Rodd, 2017), the provision of lifestyle advice for cancer prevention (Usher-Smith et al, 2018), semantic variables and list memory (Pollock, 2018), narrative engagement (Richardson et al, 2018), trust and reputation in the sharing economy (Zloteanu, Harvey, Tuckett, & Livan, 2018), how individuals' voice identities are formed (Lavan, Knight, & McGettigan, 2018), and auditory perception with degenerated music and speech (Jasmin, Dick, Holt, & Tierney, 2018). Also, several studies have preregistered reports, including explorations of object size and mental simulation of orientation (Chen, de Koning, & Zwaan, 2018) and the use of face regression models to study social perception (Jones, 2018).…”

Gorilla in our Midst: An online behavioral experiment builder

“…By lowering the barrier, Gorilla aims to make online experiments available and transparent at all levels of ability. Currently, experiments have been conducted in Gorilla on a wide variety of topics, including: cross-lingual priming (Poort & Rodd, 2017), the provision of lifestyle advice for cancer prevention (Usher-Smith et al, 2018), semantic variables and list 12 memory (Pollock, 2018), narrative engagement (Richardson et al, 2018), trust and reputation in the sharing economy (Zloteanu, Harvey, Tuckett, & Livan, 2018), how individual's voice identities are formed (Lavan, Knight, & McGettigan, 2018), and auditory perception with degenerated music and speech (Jasmin, Dick, Holt, & Tierney, 2018). Also, several studies have pre-registered reports, including: object size and mental simulation of orientation (Chen, de Koning, & Zwaan, 2018) and the use of face regression models to study social perception (Jones, 2018).…”

The Multidimensional Battery of Prosody Perception (MBOPP)

“…This suggests that impairments in pitch versus duration perception, which have been shown to be dissociable (Hyde & Peretz, 2004;Kidd et al, 2007), may not have equal effects on different aspects of prosody perception. For example, individuals with impaired pitch perception may have greater difficulties with the perception of linguistic focus than with phrase boundary perception, as we have demonstrated in amusics (Jasmin et al, 2018).…”

“…Listeners can make use of such prosodic cues to clarify potentially ambiguous syntactic structures in a sentence (Beach, 1991;Frazier, Carlson, & Clifton Jr, 2006;Lehiste, Olive, & Streeter, 1976;Marslen-Wilson, Tyler, Warren, Grenier, & Lee,, 1992;Jasmin, Dick, Holt, & Tierney, 2018). In fact, prosodic patterns may be a more powerful cue to phrase structure than statistical patterns, as artificial grammar learning experiments have shown that when prosodic cues and transitional probabilities are pitted against one another, listeners will learn hierarchical structure which reflects prosodic information (Langus, Marchetto, Bion, & Nespor, 2012).…”

“…This makes possible investigations into whether prosody perception deficits are cue-specific in certain populations. For example, we have demonstrated using the MBOPP that adults with amusia demonstrate impaired focus perception in the Pitch-Only condition, but perform similarly to typically developing adults on the Time-Only condition (Jasmin et al, 2018). Investigating the cue specificity of prosody perception deficits is one way to test the hypothesis that difficulties with prosody perception in a given population stem from auditory deficits.…”