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Updated: May 31, 2026
07:14
A Method to Study Adaptation to Left-Right Reversed Audition
Published on: October 29, 2018
Perceptual adaptation to sinewave-vocoded speech across languages
Tessa Bent1, Jeremy L Loebach, Lawrence Phillips
1Department of Speech and Hearing Sciences, Indiana University, 200 S. Jordan Ave., Bloomington, IN 47405, USA. tbent@indiana.edu
Summary
Listeners can adapt to degraded speech without full word understanding. Phonetically similar audio-visual (AV) training in a different language significantly improves adaptation to sinewave speech.
Area of Science:
- Auditory Neuroscience
- Speech Perception
- Psycholinguistics
Background:
- Listeners demonstrate remarkable adaptability to various forms of speech degradation.
- The precise informational cues driving this speech adaptation remain incompletely understood.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the role of linguistic and modality information in adaptation to degraded speech.
- To determine if phonetic similarity between training and testing languages enhances adaptation to sinewave speech.
Main Methods:
- Sinewave-vocoded speech in German, Mandarin, or English was used for training.
- Training modalities included audio-visual (AV) and audio plus still frames (A + Stills).
- Listener performance on novel sinewave-vocoded English sentences was assessed post-training.
Main Results:
- Listeners trained with German-AV materials performed comparably to those trained with English AV or A + Stills.
- Mandarin and German-A + Stills groups showed intermediate performance levels.
- Performance in trained groups significantly surpassed control groups, indicating successful adaptation.
Conclusions:
- Full lexical access is not essential for adapting to degraded speech.
- Audio-visual training in a phonetically similar language significantly facilitates adaptation to sinewave speech.
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