Perception of acoustically altered speech in adults who stutter: Preliminary findings using a Bayesian analysis...

Many factors contribute to stuttering, including phonological and temporal processing. Speech perception in challenging scenarios requires efficient temporal processing and differential weighting of the temporal envelope and fine-structure. Degrading the speech inputs would exert an additional demand on the phonological representations, storage, and retrieval, and may result in adverse effects on both speech perception and production in Adults who Stutter (AWS). This preliminary study examined how speech perception in AWS would vary in two different acoustically altered, degraded scenarios.

Twenty-two participants, eleven each in AWS and Adults who do not stutter (AWNS) groups, performed speech perception tasks in two degraded conditions: a) presence of noise, and b) chimerization. The SNR-50 in the noise condition and mean intelligibility score (number of correctly repeated keywords) in the chimerized condition were compared between AWS and AWNS. We used a Bayesian approach to statistically examine the differences in speech perception across the two groups.

The results revealed poor speech perception in noise in AWS compared to AWNS. Perception of sentence chimeras, however, was similar in both groups.

The preliminary results suggest deficits in speech perception in noise, which might be due to temporal fine-structure perception problems in AWS, imposing additional demands on phonological processing and higher cognitive mechanisms. Altogether, these results from a pilot study warrant further investigations to address the effects of faulty auditory representations on day-to-day communication in AWS.