Measuring the timeline of retroactive sentence repair

Abstract

Individuals with hearing loss are more likely to miss a word during speech perception, but can use context to retroactively repair the missing word. When sentences need to be repaired, listening effort remains elevated even after the entire sentence is heard; suggesting the repair process continues beyond the stimulus presentation. Importantly, if a listener is stuck processing a previous sentence, they may miss an upcoming utterance, making everyday conversation difficult. By measuring the amount of time that is needed to repair a missing word, we will better understand if processing would interfere with the perception of a subsequent sentence. Individuals with normal hearing and hearing loss heard sentences that did or did not require retroactive repair while performing a secondary case-judgement task. Listeners decided whether a visually presented letter was upper- or lower-case either during the sentence, 0.5 s after, or 2 s after the sentence. Preliminary results indicate that reaction times were faster for intact sentences and decrease (improve) as more time has passed (as the missing word has been resolved) for both sentence types. Our results suggest that the timeline of the repair process can be understood using behavioral measures that complement intelligibility scores.