Listener Responses Research Articles

The Effect of Dialect on Speech Audiometry Testing

In this study, the authors examined the validity of using materials from 2 nonregional yet mutually intelligible dialects to evaluate an individual's speech recognition threshold (SRT) and word recognition (WR) abilities and whether a speaker of 1 dialect could accurately administer and score materials in the other dialect. Previously created SRT and WR materials were presented to 32 Mandarin listeners with normal hearing: 16 speakers of Mainland Mandarin and 16 speakers of Taiwan Mandarin. Hearing abilities were examined using SRT and WR materials created for speakers from 2 different regional dialects. Presentation of the materials occurred during 2 test sessions, counterbalanced across material and listener dialect. Listener responses were evaluated by 2 judges; 1 spoke Mainland Mandarin, and the other spoke Taiwan Mandarin. For the SRT and WR results, differences in listener performance were statistically significant across material and listener dialect, with threshold differences of less than 2 dB HL when collapsed across session. The interscorer percentage of agreement was 99.5% for SRT and 99.1% for WR testing. Testing with materials in a different regional dialect does have a measurable impact on SRT and WR performance. However, this difference, though reliable, is small enough to have a negligible impact on clinical findings.

The Effects of Implementing the Computer-Based Listener Emersion Procedure on Learning Listener Responses of Elementary School Students with ASD

The Effects of Implementing the Computer-Based Listener Emersion Procedure on Learning Listener Responses of Elementary School Students with ASD

Individual Differences in Laughter Perception Reveal Roles for Mentalizing and Sensorimotor Systems in the Evaluation of Emotional Authenticity

Humans express laughter differently depending on the context: polite titters of agreement are very different from explosions of mirth. Using functional MRI, we explored the neural responses during passive listening to authentic amusement laughter and controlled, voluntary laughter. We found greater activity in anterior medial prefrontal cortex (amPFC) to the deliberate, Emitted Laughs, suggesting an obligatory attempt to determine others' mental states when laughter is perceived as less genuine. In contrast, passive perception of authentic Evoked Laughs was associated with greater activity in bilateral superior temporal gyri. An individual differences analysis found that greater accuracy on a post hoc test of authenticity judgments of laughter predicted the magnitude of passive listening responses to laughter in amPFC, as well as several regions in sensorimotor cortex (in line with simulation accounts of emotion perception). These medial prefrontal and sensorimotor sites showed enhanced positive connectivity with cortical and subcortical regions during listening to involuntary laughter, indicating a complex set of interacting systems supporting the automatic emotional evaluation of heard vocalizations.

Bayesian adaptive estimation of the auditory filter

A Bayesian adaptive procedure for estimating the auditory-filter shape was proposed and evaluated using young, normal-hearing listeners at moderate stimulus levels. The resulting quick-auditory-filter (qAF) procedure assumed the power spectrum model of masking with the auditory-filter shape being modeled using a spectrally symmetric, two-parameter rounded-exponential (roex) function. During data collection using the qAF procedure, listeners detected the presence of a pure-tone signal presented in the spectral notch of a noise masker. Dependent on the listener's response on each trial, the posterior probability distributions of the model parameters were updated, and the resulting parameter estimates were then used to optimize the choice of stimulus parameters for the subsequent trials. Results showed that the qAF procedure gave similar parameter estimates to the traditional threshold-based procedure in many cases and was able to reasonably predict the masked signal thresholds. Additional measurements suggested that occasional failures of the qAF procedure to reliably converge could be a consequence of incorrect responses early in a qAF track. The addition of a parameter describing lapses of attention reduced the likelihood of such failures.

The Appreciation of Electroacoustic Music: The prototype of the pedagogical ElectroAcoustic Resource Site

This article introduces research on the influence of teaching on the change of inexperienced listeners’ appreciation of electroacoustic music. A curriculum was developed to make Key Stage 3 students (11–14 years old)1 familiar with electroacoustic music. The curriculum introduced music using concepts, such as music with real-world sounds and music with generated sounds. Presented in an online environment and accompanied with a teachers’ handbook, the curriculum can be used online or as classroom-based teaching resource.The online environment was developed with the help of user-centred design. Following this, the curriculum was tested in a large-scale study including four Key Stage 3 classes within three schools in Leicester, UK. Data were collected using questionnaires, a listening response test and a summary of the teaching (letter written by participants). Qualitative content analysis was used for the data analysis.Results include the change of the participants’ appreciation of electroacoustic music during the study. Successful learning and a decrease in alienation towards electroacoustic music could be measured. The study shows that the appreciation of electroacoustic music can be enhanced through the acquirement of conceptual knowledge. Especially important was the enhancing of listening skills following a listening training as well as the broadening of the participants’ vocabulary that enabled them to describe their listening experience.

Within-consonant perceptual differences in the hearing impaired ear

The consonant recognition of 17 ears with sensorineural hearing loss is evaluated for 14 consonants /p, t, k, f, s, ∫, b, d, g, v, z, 3, m, n/+/a/, under four speech-weighted noise conditions (0, 6, 12 dB SNR, quiet). One male and one female talker were chosen for each consonant, resulting in 28 total consonant-vowel test tokens. For a given consonant, tokens by different talkers were observed to systematically differ, in both the robustness to noise and/or the resulting confusion groups. Such within-consonant token differences were observed for over 60% of the tested consonants and all HI ears. Only when HI responses are examined on an individual token basis does one find that the error may be limited to a small subset of tokens with confusion groups that are restricted to fewer than three confusions on average. Averaging different tokens of the same consonant can raise the entropy of a listener's responses (i.e., the size of the confusion group), causing the listener to appear to behave in a less systematic way. Quantifying these token differences provides insight into HI perception of speech under noisy conditions and characterizes each listener's hearing impairment.

The role of joint control in teaching listener responding to children with autism and other developmental disabilities

This study evaluated the effectiveness of a teaching procedure derived from the analysis of joint control in increasing listener responses for three children with autism using a multiple probe design across participants. One nonvocal and two vocal children with autism were taught to select multiple pictures of items from a large array in the order in which they were requested (e.g., “Give me the ball, cup, and spoon”) using the joint control teaching procedure. The effect of these procedures on the emission of accurate selection responses to both trained and novel stimulus sets was measured. The results indicated that listener responses to trained stimuli increased following the implementation of the independent variable and untrained responses across novel stimulus sets also emerged. Implications for designing language training programs for children with autism based on an analysis of joint control are discussed.

Intelligibility of Clear Speech: Effect of Instruction

The authors investigated how clear speech instructions influence sentence intelligibility. Twelve speakers produced sentences in habitual, clear, hearing impaired, and overenunciate conditions. Stimuli were amplitude normalized and mixed with multitalker babble for orthographic transcription by 40 listeners. The main analysis investigated percentage-correct intelligibility scores as a function of the 4 conditions and speaker sex. Additional analyses included listener response variability, individual speaker trends, and an alternate intelligibility measure: proportion of content words correct. Relative to the habitual condition, the overenunciate condition was associated with the greatest intelligibility benefit, followed by the hearing impaired and clear conditions. Ten speakers followed this trend. The results indicated different patterns of clear speech benefit for male and female speakers. Greater listener variability was observed for speakers with inherently low habitual intelligibility compared to speakers with inherently high habitual intelligibility. Stable proportions of content words were observed across conditions. Clear speech instructions affected the magnitude of the intelligibility benefit. The instruction to overenunciate may be most effective in clear speech training programs. The findings may help explain the range of clear speech intelligibility benefit previously reported. Listener variability analyses suggested the importance of obtaining multiple listener judgments of intelligibility, especially for speakers with inherently low habitual intelligibility.

Handedness helps homing in swimming and flying animals

Swimming and flying animals rely on their ability to home on mobile targets. In some fish, physiological handedness and homing correlate, and dolphins exhibit handedness in their listening response. Here, we explore theoretically whether the actuators, sensors, and controllers in these animals follow similar laws of self-regulation, and how handedness affects homing. We find that the acoustic sensor (combined hydrophone-accelerometer) response maps are similar to fin force maps—modeled by Stuart-Landau oscillators—allowing localization by transitional vortex-propelled animals. The planar trajectories of bats in a room filled with obstacles are approximately reproduced by the states of a pair of strong and weak olivo-cerebellar oscillators. The stereoscopy of handedness reduces ambiguity near a mobile target, resulting in accelerated homing compared to even-handedness. Our results demonstrate how vortex-propelled animals may be localizing each other and circumventing obstacles in changing environments. Handedness could be useful in time-critical robot-assisted rescues in hazardous environments.

The Sense of Sound: Musical Meaning in France 1260-1330 by Emma Dillon (review)

Reviewed by: The Sense of Sound: Musical Meaning in France 1260-1330 by Emma Dillon Robert Curry Dillon, Emma , The Sense of Sound: Musical Meaning in France 1260-1330 (New Cultural History of Music, 7), New York, Oxford University Press, 2012; hardback; pp. xxvi, 367; 64 b/w illustrations; R.R.P. £45.00; ISBN 9780199732951. Making sense of sound is a complex process entailing far more than just decoding auditory experience. Memory, visual stimuli, physical movement, and language can all play a role in conditioning the listener's response just as music's expressive power can register without our having to experience the physical sensation of sound: silent music, music recalled, read, or imagined, can move us almost as powerfully as sounding music. The Sense of Sound is a clever and apt title for a highly original, persuasively argued book. Emma Dillon's monograph explores with verve how within certain milieux in late medieval France the sensory and sensual, ambient and random, sensible and nonsensical may have been factored into the experience of music. Revealed is 'a world captured in words, images, and music, in which sounds of all kinds shaped human experience, and which also shaped musical listening' (p. 8). Taking cognisance of this world opens a vista on to the 'supermusical', a term and concept Dillon frequently uses but the precise meaning of which by its nature remains somewhat elusive. It signifies a realm of sound, real and implied, that is extraneous to (the piece of) music, in the sense of being above and beyond it, and yet integral to it also, in its potential to reveal the gamut of music's possible meanings. What does not come into the embrace of the 'supermusical' is information derived from a consideration of the music as [End Page 181] transmitted in notation. Possible musical meanings revealed and alluded to in Dillon's book, for all their subtlety and provocative insight, sit outside, that is, are tacitly divorced from a consideration of their potential interplay with musical structure, form, pitch, and rhythm. Her methodology 'position[s] sound, listening, and creative community at the center of the picture normally driven by analytic, textual, and philological imperatives' (p. 332). How this approach works in practice is the stuff of Chapter 1 in which a range of text-critical approaches is brought to bear on a genre of prime interest to Dillon, and an aspect of it that has long puzzled musicologists, namely: In what sense do polytextual motets make sense? To press the case for verbal sound in this genre taking precedence over verbal sense, Dillon explicates in turn each voice of Le premier jor/ Par un matin/ Je ne puis plus/ Iustus demonstrating their intelligibility as independent monophonic songs before revealing that, in fact, they constitute a single composition: three French-texted parts sounding simultaneously over a Latin-texted tenor. Chapters 2 to 4 deal with external sound worlds. Adducing evidence from sources such as the manuscript illuminations of the Vita of St Denis, and literary works by Guillot de Paris, Jean de Jandun, and John of Garland, Dillon proceeds to a close reading of a trouvère chanson de recontre and two motets from the Montpellier Codex H.196. In Chapter 3, the focus is on the rambunctious carry-on of charivari as evidenced in Paris, BnF. fr. 146, the illuminated reworking of the Roman de Fauvel by Chaillou de Pesstain that is suffused with over 169 musical interpolations. Readers familiar with Dillon's first monograph, Medieval Music-Making and the 'Roman de Fauvel' (Cambridge University Press, 2002), will recall the imaginative flair and analytical insight she brought to this much-studied manuscript showing how music can be expressive in ways that are unperformable apart from visual representation. In The Sense of Sound, Dillon turns to the sotes chançons, specifically, the sub-genre of fratras. Its playful use of nonsense lyrics and sparseness of musical notation she sees as the very embodiment of charivari. She deftly traces the complex web of interconnections that link the refrain of the fratras, An Diex, with one of the most complex pieces in the Roman de Fauvel, the polytextual motet Quasi non ministerium...

Écouter le monde mais n’entendre que soi

This essay problematizes some of the ways in which aesthetic preferences intersect with listeners’ perspectives on borders, boundary crossings, and constructions of authenticity as they encounter musical hybridity and processes of globalization. Using analytical ideas drawn from hybridity theory (Garcia Canclini, Kraidy, Young, Deleuze, Stross) and ethnographic data from the responses of university listeners who respond to two pop songs from Mali, the author suggests that “perceived authenticity” is a primary filter for the valuation of world musics. Although marketers exploit these perceptions, understanding that authenticity is more malleable and cyclic than its definition suggests reveals the complicated nexus between category boundaries, audience expectation, and the hybridizing processes of cultural interaction.

Automatic generation of tourism quiz using blogs

The one-way information communication provision does not impress listeners well. As an efficient way, Question & Answer can not only help listeners to comprehend the content of information but also help information providers understand the response of listeners. However, it is not easy for everyone to create suitable questions. In this paper, we propose an automatic quiz generation system using tourism blogs. The system can generate quizzes by extracting feature words of the topic keyword from blogs. Our purpose is to help tourism information providers to advertise their tourism events in an interactive way, in order to impress tourists. When compared with other methods of quiz generation, we demonstrate that our method is more suitable for information communication provision.

Cues for the perception of expressive speech

In a previous study the contribution of fundamental frequency (F0) to the perception of expressive speech was examined using a selective adaptation technique. Listeners heard either F0-present or F0-removed adaptors (vocoder-processed VCV syllables) from one of two expressive categories: angry or happy. In a two-alternative listening task, contrastive aftereffects (characterized by a tendency to label test stimuli as originating from the non-adapted category) were documented only in the F0-present condition. This suggests that F0 is important for the perception of emotional expressions. However, listeners were still able to identify F0-removed syllables as angry or happy at a rate significantly better than chance (58%). Subsequent analyses revealed systematic differences in formant frequencies as potential cues for categorization (higher F1 and F2 frequencies for happy compared to angry tokens). A discriminant analysis was performed using formant measurements (F1-F3) and measures related to the voicing source. Removing voice source measures (including mean F0) produced a decrease in classification accuracy that closely matched listener response patterns for the F0-removed stimuli. The results suggest that in the absence of F0, formant frequencies may be used for perception of angry and happy speech.

‘Tell Me a Story:’ Their Power to Teach and Recall

‘Tell Me a Story:’ Their Power to Teach and Recall

How students socially evaluate interest: Peer responsiveness influences evaluation and maintenance of interest

Social influences (e.g., by teachers, parents and peers) on students’ experience of interest are typically described in terms of affecting students’ initial choice of and/or completion of specific educational activities. When considered within the framework of the Self-Regulation of Motivation (SRM) model, however, other people may influence the interest experience even after activity completion, by influencing how a person evaluates that past experience. Previous experimental research showed that when students talked about a game upon completion, listeners’ responsiveness influenced their evaluation of interest. The present research examined whether peer responsiveness when undergraduates talked about topics covered in actual classes predicted students’ evaluation of class interest. In Study 1, we examined responsiveness in the context of conversations that took place as a structured part of an online psychology class (i.e., discussion board), and found that the frequency of replies from classmates to students’ posts (but not the reverse) predicted students’ interest in the class measured at the end of the semester. In Study 2, we examined responsiveness in the context of students’ reported everyday conversations about two completed interesting class topics or two completed class exams in an introductory physics course. Perceived listener responsiveness in conversations about class topics (but not about exams) predicted students’ concurrent evaluation of class interest, even when controlling for anticipated interest at the beginning of the semester. Moreover, listeners indirectly affected interest measured at the end of the semester via their influence on interest during the semester.

Beyond the myth of venting: Social sharing modes determine the benefits of emotional disclosure

AbstractWhen individuals experience an emotion, they talk about it afterwards. A popular ‘emotional venting’ belief claims that doing so dissolves the emotional impact. This study tested a model of when and how sharing emotions is beneficial. It predicts that benefits vary according to the listener's response mode. A socio‐affective (empathic) mode was expected to buffer emotional distress temporarily. A cognitive (reframing) mode was anticipated to grant emotional recovery. Participants viewed an aversive film and then talked about it with an intimate. The latter was instructed to adopt either cognitive or socio‐affective response modes in a 2 × 2 design (cognitive/non‐cognitive; socio‐affective/neutral). Emotional, cognitive and social benefits were assessed immediately afterwards and again 2 days later following re‐exposure to the film. As predicted, emotional recovery occurred exclusively when the listener stimulated the participant's cognitive work. Cognitive variables (basic assumptions) were also positively modified by these conditions. Listeners' socio‐affective responses entailed enhanced social integration (i.e. greater proximity to the listener; less loneliness) and an impression of feeling better. These results demonstrated that sharing emotions can lead to multiple benefits depending upon the listeners' response modes: emotional recovery, consolidation of shattered assumptions, social integration and temporary distress reduction. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Analyzing nonverbal listener responses using parallel recordings of multiple listeners

In this paper, we study nonverbal listener responses on a corpus with multiple parallel recorded listeners. These listeners were meant to believe that they were the sole listener, while in fact there were three persons listening to the same speaker. The speaker could only see one of the listeners. We analyze the impact of the particular setup of the corpus on the behavior and perception of the two types of listeners: the listeners that could be seen by the speaker and the listeners that could not be seen. Furthermore, we compare the nonverbal listening behaviors of these three listeners to each other with regard to timing and form. We correlate these behaviors with behaviors of the speaker, like pauses and whether the speaker is looking at the listeners or not.

Influence of Task-Relevant and Task-Irrelevant Feature Continuity on Selective Auditory Attention

Past studies have explored the relative strengths of auditory features in a selective attention task by pitting features against one another and asking listeners to report the words perceived in a given sentence. While these studies show that the continuity of competing features affects streaming, they did not address whether the influence of specific features is modulated by volitionally directed attention. Here, we explored whether the continuity of a task-irrelevant feature affects the ability to selectively report one of two competing speech streams when attention is specifically directed to a different feature. Sequences of simultaneous pairs of spoken digits were presented in which exactly one digit of each pair matched a primer phrase in pitch and exactly one digit of each pair matched the primer location. Within a trial, location and pitch were randomly paired; they either were consistent with each other from digit to digit or were switched (e.g., the sequence from the primer's location changed pitch across digits). In otherwise identical blocks, listeners were instructed to report digits matching the primer either in location or in pitch. Listeners were told to ignore the irrelevant feature, if possible, in order to perform well. Listener responses depended on task instructions, proving that top-down attention alters how a subject performs the task. Performance improved when the separation of the target and masker in the task-relevant feature increased. Importantly, the values of the task-irrelevant feature also influenced performance in some cases. Specifically, when instructed to attend location, listeners performed worse as the separation between target and masker pitch increased, especially when the spatial separation between digits was small. These results indicate that task-relevant and task-irrelevant features are perceptually bound together: continuity of task-irrelevant features influences selective attention in an automatic, obligatory manner, consistent with the idea that auditory attention operates on objects.

Stories from the Anne Grimes Collection of American Folk Music (review)

Stories from the Anne Grimes Collection of American Folk Music. By Anne Grimes. Compiled and edited by Sara Grimes, Jennifer Grimes Kay, Mary Grimes, and Mindy Grimes. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2010. [xii, 188 p. ISBN 9780821419083 (hardcover), $59.95; 9780821419434 (paperback), $34.95.] Music examples, transcriptions, map, photographs, bibliography, indexes, compact disc. Too few presses publish too few studies covering the pioneers of folklore and ethnomusicology. When such a work arises, it becomes essential in filling out our understanding not only of the lives, methods, and motivations of these pioneers, but also in revealing the foundation upon which all of our studies are based. Stories from the Anne Grimes Collection of American Folk Music is essential for just these reasons. It is also a delight to read on several accounts, not the least being its simple and accessible layout. The book begins with a clear, interesting introduction by the editors providing the details of Grimes' life and the genesis and development of her folk song and dulcimer collecting passion. Forty chapters follow the introduction, each featuring a performer, collector, or craftsman (and they were all men) who contributed to her impressive interview/ song archive and dulcimer collection. Concluding the book are full sections of notes, profiles of the performers and other interview contributors, bibliography, and acknowledgments. Anne Laylin Grimes (1912-2004) was not a degreed ethnomusicologist, nor did she begin or end her undergraduate or graduate education studying folk culture or folk music. Raised in a family that regularly gathered to sing songs around the piano, she was an accomplished pianist and vocalist from an early age, pursuing classical music studies in college and obtaining an M.A. in music history in the 1930s. She was a music and dance critic for a local newspaper in Ohio, and she hosted a radio music show on WOSU (Columbus, Ohio) in the early 1940s. This early activity, though, centered on classical music, a conventional focus for anyone in higher education in the 1930s and 1940s. She grew up appreciating the songs of her family, and that background proved to be her breakthrough into folk music. On one of her radio shows the featured guest did not arrive, so Grimes improvised by singing her grandmother's songs while accompanying herself on piano. The listener response to that show was overwhelming, which made her realize that a huge popular interest existed for exactly that kind of music-traditional music, of whatever stripe. Members of her radio audience sent her their own stories about the songs she had sung, as well as their variations on them. From that moment, Grimes began documenting the traditional music of Ohio, first by notating the songs and interviews she conducted, and then by taping, beginning in 1953, on a reel-to-reel Magnecorder. Over time, she recorded hundreds of people and songs-in the 1950s, while raising her family of five children, she recorded 170 people. Nearly all were from Ohio, but she also recorded performers, dulcimer collectors, and luthiers when she traveled to several National Folk Festivals (such as in St. Louis in 1953) or to Bascom Lamar Lunsford's Mountain Dance and Folk Festival, notably in 1952. That was the year she was introduced to the dulcimer and to the preeminent dulcimer maker, Wade Martin. Ultimately acquiring forty-two dulcimers, mostly from Ohio but also from Kentucky and other areas of the Upper Ohio River Valley, her dulcimer collection began with Wade Martin. Others she interviewed and collected songs from-her contributors, as she called them-included a vast array of traditional singers and musicians from Ohio as well as from across the country, coupled with scholars (like Francis Lee Utley) and odd familiar names-Carl Sandburg, Branch Rickey-who had an interest in traditional songs or, in Branch Rickey's case, traditional narrative. Grimes capitalized on her social engagements and gatherings to collect from her contributors-she collected from Sandburg at the 1953 National Folk Festival in St. …

Emergent listener responses following intraverbal training in children with autism

We examined the emergence of listener responses following intraverbal training in four children with autism. Intraverbal training consisted of a transfer-of-control procedure in which the participants were taught to answer questions in the form of “What is the state bird of [name of state]” using either picture prompts (tact-to-intraverbal transfer-of-control procedures) or vocal prompts (echoic to intraverbal transfer-of-control procedures). Prior to intraverbal training, the participants were able to tact pictures of all the birds. Following training, listener posttests showed that the participants were able to correctly point to pictures of the birds upon hearing the spoken name of the state, although those responses had not been directly taught. For one participant, the tact-to-intraverbal transfer-of-control procedure resulted in greater number of emergent listener responses.