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http://hdl.handle.net/11375/27985
Title: | SPEECH IN NOISE: EFFECTS OF NOISE ON SPEECH PERCEPTION AND SPOKEN WORD COMPREHENSION |
Authors: | Eranović, Jovan |
Advisor: | Stroińska, Magda |
Department: | Cognitive Science of Language |
Keywords: | speech in noise, energetic masking, informational masking, speech perception, spoken word comprehension |
Publication Date: | 2022 |
Abstract: | The study investigated the effects of noise, one of the major environmental stressors, on speech perception and spoken word comprehension. Three tasks were employed – listening span, listening comprehension, and shadowing – in order to find out to what extent different types of background noise affected speech perception and encoding into working verbal memory, as well as spoken word comprehension. Six types of maskers were used – (1) single babble masker in English, (2) single babble masker in Mandarin, (3) multi babble masker in Greek and (4) construction site noise, (5) narrow-band speech signal emulating phone effect and (6) reverberated speech signal. These could be categorized as energetic (2, 3, and 4), informational (1) and signal degradation (6 and 7) noise maskers. The study found that general speech perception and specific word comprehension are not equally affected by the different noise maskers – if shadowing is considered primarily a task relying on speech perception, with the other two tasks considered to rely on working memory, word comprehension and semantic inference. The results indicate that informational masking is most detrimental to speech perception, while energetic masking and sound degradation are most detrimental to spoken word comprehension. The results imply that masking categories must be used with caution, since not all maskers belonging to one category had the same effect on performance. Finally, introducing a noise component to any memory task, particularly to speech perception and spoken word recognition tasks, adds another cognitively stimulating real-life dimension to them. This could be beneficial to students training to become interpreters helping them to get accustomed to working in a noisy environment, an inevitable part of this profession. A final study explored the effects of noise on automatic speech recognition. The same types of noise as in the human studies were tested on two automatic speech recognition programs: Otter and Ava. This technology was originally developed as an aid for the deaf and hard of hearing. However, their application has since been extended to a broad range of fields, including education, healthcare and finance. The analysis of the transcripts created by the two programs found speech to text technology to be fairly resilient to the degradation of the speech signal, while mechanical background noise still presented a serious challenge to this technology. |
URI: | http://hdl.handle.net/11375/27985 |
Appears in Collections: | Open Access Dissertations and Theses |
Files in This Item:
File | Description | Size | Format | |
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Eranović_Jovan_2022August_PhD.pdf | 3.48 MB | Adobe PDF | View/Open |
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