Accommodation to sinewave speech is an online effect.

Abstract

In earlier work [Hillenbrand et al., J. Acoust. Soc. Am., 124, 2435 (2008)], we reported poor intelligibility (53.5%) for sinewave replicas of vowels in /hVd/ syllables. Tests with a separate group of listeners showed substantially higher intelligibility (73.1%) when the same syllables were preceded by a brief sinewave carrier phrase (CP). Additional tests showed the following: (1) a CP enhancement effect was seen even when the talkers used to generate the CP and the /hVd/ syllables did not match, showing that listeners are accommodating to the sinewave speech patterns and not solely to the talkers, and (2) a natural speech CP produced a decrease in intelligibility, showing again that listeners are accommodating in some way to the unusual characteristics of sinewave speech. In the present study, listeners identified sinewave /hVd/ syllables either alone or preceded by the sinewave CP in alternating blocks of trials (i.e., sinewave /hVd/ syllables alone and /hVd/ syllables preceded by a sinewave CP). Results using this alternating‐block format showed that enhancement due to the CP comes and goes as the CP comes and goes. This finding suggests that the effect is an online or real‐time effect. [Work supported by NIH.]