Abstract
We examined how well typical adult listeners remember the speech of a person with a voice disorder (relative to that of a person without a voice disorder). Participants (n = 40) listened to two lists of words (one list uttered in a disordered voice and the other list uttered in a normal voice). After each list, participants completed a free recall test, in which they tried to remember as many words as they could. While the total number of words recalled did not differ between the disordered voice condition and the normal voice condition, an investigation of the serial-position curve revealed a difference. In the normal voice condition, a parabolic (i.e., u-shaped) serial-position curve was observed, with a significant primacy effect (i.e., the beginning of the list was remembered better than the middle) and a significant recency effect (i.e., the end of the list was remembered better than the middle). In contrast, in the disordered voice condition, while there was a significant recency effect, no primacy effect was present. Thus, the increased ability to remember the first words uttered by a speaker (relative to subsequent words) may disappear when the speaker has a voice disorder. Explanations and implications of this finding are discussed.
Highlights
People differ widely in how they speak, and listeners need to adapt to these differences for spoken language processing to be efficient and accurate [1,2]
The percentage of words recalled at each of the three serial positions in the normal and disordered voice conditions were submitted to an analysis of variance (ANOVA)
The lack of a significant main effect of voice condition indicated that the percentage of words recalled did not differ between the normal voice condition and the disordered voice condition overall
Summary
People differ widely in how they speak, and listeners need to adapt to these differences for spoken language processing to be efficient and accurate [1,2]. It can be hypothesized that words uttered in a disordered voice will be remembered with less accuracy than words uttered in a normal voice This prediction is based on the ‘effortfulness hypothesis’ [5], which is the notion that in adverse listening situations (relative to normal listening situations), listeners will allocate more cognitive resources to identifying the spoken words, thereby leaving fewer cognitive resources left over for encoding those words into memory. On this view, a disordered voice, which one might consider an adverse listening situation, will negative affect word memory. While the ‘effortfulness hypothesis’ has not yet been applied to voice disordered speech, it can successfully account for weaker memory performance in other adverse listening situations, such as processing speech in either a noisy environment [6,7], with a hearing impairment [8], or in a second language [9]
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