The effect of voice quality and competing speakers in a passage comprehension task: performance in relation to cognitive functioning in children with normal hearing

Abstract

The children's susceptibility to the effect of the dysphonic voice and the background listening conditions are related to the individual's executive functions. The findings have several implications for design of interventions in language learning environments such as classrooms.

Imitating dysphonic voice: a suitable technique to create speech stimuli for spoken language processing tasks?

“…The problem is that some speakers may be resistant to vocal loading [16]. Note also that only mild to moderate degrees of dysphonia were achieved in the abovementioned studies [2][3][4]8,9,12], ranging from 4 to 5 on an 11-point scale. While hyperfunctional voice quality was provoked, hoarseness was not.…”

“…During the past decade, an increasing amount of studies have investigated the effect of speaker's impaired voice quality on spoken language processing [1][2][3][4]. In listening experiments, participants are presented with speech samples in a normal and/or dysphonic voice and perform a linguistic task, such as sentence-picture matching.…”

“…Spoken language processing refers to a listener's ability to process acoustic information and map it onto linguistic representations which can then be manipulated and memorized to allow the understanding of speech [5]. Research suggests that listening to impaired voice may impede spoken language processing at different stages ranging from low-level speech perception to high-level listening comprehension [1][2][3][4][6][7][8][9][10][11][12]. This may be due to the increased noise components characterizing dysphonic voices [13].…”

“…In the educational context, past studies repeatedly addressed the question whether children are still able to listen effectively and recall oral information if their teacher is dysphonic [1][2][3]7]. Effects of normal versus impaired voice on children's spoken language processing have been investigated in sentence-picture matching tasks [3,11], passage comprehension tasks [1,2,4,6,7,9,10], and phoneme discrimination tasks [1]. To date, there is no consensus on how dysphonic voice samples should best be obtained.…”

“…Such potential confounding factors may be overcome when speech samples are produced by the same person. Dysphonic voice in otherwise voice-healthy speakers may be provoked through vocal loading tasks -a method repeatedly applied by Lyberg-Åhlander and associated researchers [2][3][4]8,9,12], who followed the procedure described in Whitling, Rydell, and Lyberg-Åhlander [15]. In this vocal loading task, which is claimed to temporarily provoke impaired voice [8], speakers read out a text against background noise leveled at 85 dB SPL until the point when they "feel a discomfort in their throat" (maximum time limit of 30 minutes) [15, p.261.el5].…”