Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Zekveld, Adriana A
• Rudner, Mary
• Johnsrude, Ingrid S
• Rönnberg, Jerker

Titel

The effects of working memory capacity and semantic cues on the intelligibility of speech in noise

Ist Teil von

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 2013-09, Vol.134 (3), p.2225-2234

Ort / Verlag

United States

Erscheinungsjahr

2013

Quelle

American Institute of Physics

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• This study examined how semantically related information facilitates the intelligibility of spoken sentences in the presence of masking sound, and how this facilitation is influenced by masker type and by individual differences in cognitive functioning. Dutch sentences were masked by stationary noise, fluctuating noise, or an interfering talker. Each sentence was preceded by a text cue; cues were either three words that were semantically related to the sentence or three unpronounceable nonwords. Speech reception thresholds were adaptively measured. Additional measures included working memory capacity (reading span and size comparison span), linguistic closure ability (text reception threshold), and delayed sentence recognition. Word cues facilitated speech perception in noise similarly for all masker types. Cue benefit was related to reading span performance when the masker was interfering speech, but not when other maskers were used, and it did not correlate with text reception threshold or size comparison span. Better reading span performance was furthermore associated with enhanced delayed recognition of sentences preceded by word relative to nonword cues, across masker types. The results suggest that working memory capacity is associated with release from informational masking by semantically related information, and additionally with the encoding, storage, or retrieval of speech content in memory.