Degraded word recognition in isolation vs a carrier phrase

Abstract

Recognizing a spoken word presented in isolation is a markedly different task from recognizing a word in a carrier phrase. The presence of a carrier phrase provides additional challenges such as lexical segmentation but also provides additional information relevant to word recognition such as speaking rate and talker-specific spectral characteristics. The current set of studies is part of an attempt to determine how target word recognition differs in isolation versus in a carrier phrase. In an initial experiment, a set of 220 spoken CVC words were noise-vocoded (6 channel) and presented to listeners either in isolation or following a noise-vocoded carrier phrase—“The next word on the list is…” The target words were transcribed in each condition and scored for initial consonant accuracy and overall word accuracy. Despite the lack of semantic or syntactic information provided by the carrier phrase accuracy for both word and consonant recognition were much higher in the carrier phrase context. A second experiment, used different talkers for the carrier phrase and target word. A smaller but significant benefit over isolation was present for these mixed talker stimuli suggesting that the benefits of the carrier phrase include, but are not limited to, talker-specific information.