Speech Perception in Noise

Most real-world speech communication occurs in the presence of some kind of background noise, and it well-known that noise can have quite dramatic deleterious effects on speech communication at all levels of the system. In our current work on speech-in-noise perception we are trying to understand how listeners “tune into” target speech and “tune out” background noise under conditions that attempt to isolate or control the level at which the primary effect of the noise operates, ranging from lower-level, signal encoding to higher-level access to long-term cognitive representations.

Major foci of our current work in this area are:

(a) The effects of different kinds of noise including (but not limited to):

· Speech versus non-speech (broadband white, pink or speech-spectrum shaped) noise

· Same language versus different language background speech

· Meaningful versus semantically anomalous background speech

(b) The separate and combined effects of acoustic-phonetic and semantic-contextual enhancement for speech-in-noise perception by various listeners populations

Publications
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· Van Engen, K. and Bradlow, A. R. (2007). Sentence recognition in native- and foreign-language multi-talker background noise. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 121(1), 519-526.

· Bradlow, A. R. and Alexander, J. A. (2007). Semantic-contextual and acoustic-phonetic enhancements for English sentence-in-noise recognition by native and non-native listeners. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 121(4), 2339-2349.

· Clopper, C. G. and Bradlow, A. R. (In press) Perception of dialect variation in noise: Intelligibility and classification. Language and Speech.