Abstract
The intelligibility of periodically interrupted speech improves once the silent gaps are filled with noise bursts. This improvement has been attributed to phonemic restoration, a top-down repair mechanism that helps intelligibility of degraded speech in daily life. Two hypotheses were investigated using perceptual learning of interrupted speech. If different cognitive processes played a role in restoring interrupted speech with and without filler noise, the two forms of speech would be learned at different rates and with different perceived mental effort. If the restoration benefit were an artificial outcome of using the ecologically invalid stimulus of speech with silent gaps, this benefit would diminish with training. Two groups of normal-hearing listeners were trained, one with interrupted sentences with the filler noise, and the other without. Feedback was provided with the auditory playback of the unprocessed and processed sentences, as well as the visual display of the sentence text. Training increased the overall performance significantly, however restoration benefit did not diminish. The increase in intelligibility and the decrease in perceived mental effort were relatively similar between the groups, implying similar cognitive mechanisms for the restoration of the two types of interruptions. Training effects were generalizable, as both groups improved their performance also with the other form of speech than that they were trained with, and retainable. Due to null results and relatively small number of participants (10 per group), further research is needed to more confidently draw conclusions. Nevertheless, training with interrupted speech seems to be effective, stimulating participants to more actively and efficiently use the top-down restoration. This finding further implies the potential of this training approach as a rehabilitative tool for hearing-impaired/elderly populations.
Highlights
Normal-hearing listeners use several top-down mechanisms that help speech perception in difficult listening environments
In the special case of phonemic restoration, the restoration benefit is commonly shown by the increase in intelligibility of periodically interrupted speech when the silent intervals are filled with noise bursts that would be capable of masking the speech [2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9]
A baseline intelligibility of interrupted sentences, with and without the filler noise, was measured. These pre-training results were comparable to previous studies on intelligibility of interrupted speech [16,22,44,45], and on restoration benefit observed with additional filler noise in silent intervals [5,6,7,9]
Summary
Normal-hearing listeners use several top-down mechanisms that help speech perception in difficult listening environments. In the case of restoration, the filler noise adds ambiguity for the perceptual system, where the system tends towards forming a full object, rather than perceiving the individual pieces per se, referred to as the Gestalt principles of closure [2,3]. These closure mechanisms, presumably help with the speech restoration
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