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PhD Talks

Tuesday 28 May 2024, 4.00PM to 5.00pm

Speaker(s): Alex Mepham, Boon Toh

  1. Alex Mepham - "The adaptation time-course of linguistic interference on speech recognition and listening effort"
    Listening to speech in noise can be particularly challenging for various listener groups. Many studies have demonstrated the effect of linguistic interference on overall speech perception, with lower accuracy among intelligible than unintelligible maskers. Less research has investigated how this linguistic interference effect, as well as physiological pupillometric measures of listening effort, change over the course of a test block. We ran three experiments to assess how listeners adapt to intelligible and unintelligible competing speech over 50 trials: Experiment 1 used an adaptive procedure to find listeners’ 50% speech reception threshold (SRT) for each condition; Experiment 2 used a fixed signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) across masker conditions; and Experiment 3 obtained 66% SRT for the intelligible maskers (i.e., making the condition easier) and 41% SRT for the unintelligible maskers (i.e., making the condition harder). We found that across experiments listeners improved in speech recognition accuracy over time, and that pupillometric measures of listening effort decreased over time. We found evidence of linguistic interference in terms of SNR (Experiment 1), performance accuracy (Experiment 2) and pupillometric measures of listening effort (Experiment 3) demonstrating the pervasive effect of intelligible maskers when listening to a target talker in measures of accuracy and effort.
  2. Boon Toh - Title tbc

Location: PS/B/020