Abstract

In most real-world communicative environments, speech signals are fragmented and incomplete due to masking by other concurrent sounds. Experiments in the perception of gated and time-compressed speech provide a useful approach for systematically investigating factors involved in the perception of temporally fragmented speech. In the current work, the intelligibility of spoken sentences was measured following periodic signal interruption at various square-wave gating rates with time compression applied by either omitting or doubling silent intervals during gated-off times. Across interruption rates (0.5–16 Hz), speech perception of younger and older normal-hearing and older hearing-impaired adults was similar for slow interruption rates, but differed substantially for the faster rates. This rate-dependent variation was consistently found for different interruption methods and conditions. Importantly, speech perception at fast interruption rates correlated strongly with pure-tone thresholds and performance on speech-in-noise tests, while it did not correlate with results from tests of working memory or spectro-temporal pattern discrimination. These findings suggest that different perceptual processes are involved in the perception of interrupted speech at slow and at faster interruption rates, and have implications for developing diagnostic tests applicable to real-world listening environments. [Work supported by NIH.]

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