Effects of speaking style and context on online word recognition in adverse listening conditions

Abstract

This study investigated the time-course of word recognition in adverse listening conditions. Specifically, we examined the effect of different listener-oriented speaking styles and semantic context on lexical access in quiet and in noise. Young adult listeners participated in an online visual word recognition experiment. They heard sentences with a high- versus low-predictability semantic context, produced in Conversational (CO), Infant-Directed (IDS), and Clear (CS) speech while fixating two pictures on a screen: a target that matched the last word of the auditory stimulus and a distractor. All sentences were presented either in quiet, or mixed with speech-shaped noise at a −5 dB SNR. Results showed that IDS provided similar perceptual benefits to adult listeners as CS. Relative to low-predictability CO baseline, IDS and CS increased speed of word recognition for high-predictability sentences, in quiet and in noise equally. However, in the quiet condition, lexical access was eventually facilitated by contextual cues even in CO, but listeners in noise reliably focused the target only when a combination of contextual cues and exaggerated acoustic-phonetic cues was available. These findings suggest that both semantic cues and listener-oriented acoustic enhancements are needed for reliable and rapid lexical access, especially in adverse conditions.