Effects of aero-tactile stimuli on continuous speech perception

Abstract

We follow up on research demonstrating that aerotactile information can enhance accurate identification of stop- and fricative-onset syllables in two-way forced-choice experiments (Derrick, et al., 2014) to include open-set identification tasks. We recorded audio and speech airflow simultaneously from the lips of two New Zealand English (NZE) speakers (one female, one male), and used these recordings to produce an auditory/aero-tactile matrix sentence test. The airflow signal is used to drive a piezoelectric air pump that delivers airflow to the right temple simultaneously with presentation of noise-degraded auditory recordings. Participants (including native NZE speakers with and without hearing impairment, and normal-hearing native non-NZE and non-native English speakers) listen to and repeat 5-word sentences presented in noise with and without simultaneous airflow. Their open-set responses are scored by the researchers. Custom-written software identifies the SNRs for 20% and 80% word identification accuracy using a dual-track adaptive algorithm, and these data are fitted to psychometric curves relating SNR to speech intelligibility. Psychometric curves for airflow and no-airflow conditions will be compared in order to identify the influence of airflow on continuous speech perception. Data collection is in progress, and the results will be presented at the ASA conference.