The importance of spatial and talker cues in competing sentence recall.
Item
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Title
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The importance of spatial and talker cues in competing sentence recall.
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Identifier
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AAI9510693
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identifier
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9510693
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Creator
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Medwetsky, Larry.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Arthur Boothroyd
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Date
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1994
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Health Sciences, Audiology | Psychology, Experimental | Psychology, General | Health Sciences, Speech Pathology
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Abstract
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The listener in a competing message situation has access to multiple acoustic and linguistic cues that enable him or her to separate the target from the competing message(s). Studies have shown that listeners have derived the most benefit from spatial cues (i.e., the spatial location of source relative to competing stimuli), followed by talker related cues (such as differences in voice pitch and voice quality). In the absence of these acoustic cues, listeners have had great difficulty in attending to and recalling the target message. However, generalization of these findings is confounded by a number of issues. Many of these studies used linguistically impoverished stimuli to evaluate their subjects. In the absence of sufficient linguistic information, subjects were probably forced to rely more heavily on acoustic cues. In other studies (eg., shadowing paradigms that used connected discourse), the attention tasks were far more demanding than would typically be encountered in everyday listening situations. In only a few studies has the listening context involved the processing of competing sentences.;The main purpose of this study was to assess the importance of both spatial and talker cues on various auditory attention tasks (selective attention, divided attention, partial report) and to determine whether auditory attention and recall remains possible when spatial and talker identity cues are omitted. Sentences were used to generalize the findings to natural listening contexts.;The results showed that subjects performed best on all recall tasks when the spatial cue was present. In the absence of the spatial cue, adding the talker cue facilitated performance, although not to the same extent as the spatial cue. Performance dropped significantly when both acoustic cues were removed, however, subjects were still able to repeat a significant portion of the target message(s), especially on short sentences. This suggests that in natural listening situations, individuals not only benefit from spatial and talker cues, but, that short-term spectral cues and linguistic context may also be useful.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
