Abstract
The goal of this developmental speech perception study was to assess whether and how age group modulated the influences of high-level semantic context and low-level fundamental frequency (F0) contours on the recognition of Mandarin speech by elementary and middle-school-aged children in quiet and interference backgrounds. The results revealed different patterns for semantic and F0 information. One the one hand, age group modulated significantly the use of F0 contours, indicating that elementary school children relied more on natural F0 contours than middle school children during Mandarin speech recognition. On the other hand, there was no significant modulation effect of age group on semantic context, indicating that children of both age groups used semantic context to assist speech recognition to a similar extent. Furthermore, the significant modulation effect of age group on the interaction between F0 contours and semantic context revealed that younger children could not make better use of semantic context in recognizing speech with flat F0 contours compared with natural F0 contours, while older children could benefit from semantic context even when natural F0 contours were altered, thus confirming the important role of F0 contours in Mandarin speech recognition by elementary school children. The developmental changes in the effects of high-level semantic and low-level F0 information on speech recognition might reflect the differences in auditory and cognitive resources associated with processing of the two types of information in speech perception.
Highlights
Speech recognition involves smooth and rapid integration of perceptual and cognitive systems, during which lower- and higher-level information sources in the spoken language are analyzed and synthesized (Moore et al, 2008)
This study focused on the two age groups because children 11 years of age and older exhibited adult-like performance on speech recognition in noise (Stuart, 2005)
For the present study that focused on elementary and middle school-aged children, our results showed that both groups of children performed better on speech recognition in quiet than in the interference background and that both groups benefited from semantic context to a similar degree regardless of listening backgrounds
Summary
Speech recognition involves smooth and rapid integration of perceptual and cognitive systems, during which lower- and higher-level information sources in the spoken language are analyzed and synthesized (Moore et al, 2008). Acoustic-phonetic cues are often insufficient for the identification of particular words because of speech signal quality (e.g., distortion to speech sounds caused by poor articulation) or listening background (e.g., the Mandarin Speech Intelligibility for Children presence of noise or interfering speech). In such circumstances, various supportive mechanisms, especially the semantic context from the preceding words in an utterance or discourse can help the listener perceive, recognize, and understand subsequent words. Dubno et al (2000) showed that both older and young adults derived greater contextual benefit for recognizing the sentence-final word in the presence of masking broadband noise when compared with quiet, indicating the significant interaction between listening condition and semantic context for speech intelligibility
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