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Do we rely on good-enough processing in reading under auditory and visual noise? PLoS One 2023; 18:e0277429. [PMID: 36693033 PMCID: PMC9873184 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0277429] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 09/16/2021] [Accepted: 10/27/2022] [Indexed: 01/25/2023] Open
Abstract
Noise, as part of real-life communication flow, degrades the quality of linguistic input and affects language processing. According to predictions of the noisy-channel and good-enough processing models, noise should make comprehenders rely more on word-level semantics instead of actual syntactic relations. However, empirical evidence supporting this prediction is still lacking. For the first time, we investigated whether auditory (three-talker babble) and visual (short idioms appearing next to a target sentence on the screen) noise would trigger greater reliance on semantics and make readers of Russian sentences process the sentences superficially. Our findings suggest that, although Russian speakers generally relied on semantics in sentence comprehension, neither auditory nor visual noise increased this reliance. The only effect of noise on semantic processing was found in reading speed under auditory noise measured by first fixation duration: only without noise, the semantically implausible sentences were read slower than semantically plausible ones. These results do not support the predictions of the study based on the noisy-channel and good-enough processing models, which is discussed in light of the methodological differences among the studies of noise and their possible limitations.
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Stine-Morrow EA, McCall GS. Reading comprehension is both incremental and segmental—and the balance may shift with aging. PSYCHOLOGY OF LEARNING AND MOTIVATION 2022. [DOI: 10.1016/bs.plm.2022.08.005] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 10/14/2022]
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Wasiuk PA, Radvansky GA, Greene RL, Calandruccio L. Spoken narrative comprehension for young adult listeners: effects of competing voices and noise. Int J Audiol 2021; 60:711-722. [PMID: 33586551 DOI: 10.1080/14992027.2021.1878397] [Citation(s) in RCA: 1] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.3] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 10/22/2022]
Abstract
OBJECTIVE To examine the influence of competing voices or noise on the comprehension of spoken narratives for young adults. DESIGN First, an intelligibility assessment of the target narratives was conducted to establish a signal-to-noise ratio ensuring accurate initial speech recognition. Then, narrative comprehension for two target types (fixed and varied target talker) was measured in four listening conditions (quiet, one-talker speech, speech babble, speech-shaped noise). After hearing target narratives in each listening condition, participants completed a visual recognition memory task that assessed the comprehension of the narrative materials at three levels of representation (surface form, propositional, event model). STUDY SAMPLE Seventy adults (18-32 years of age). RESULTS Narrative comprehension results revealed a main effect of listening condition at the event model level, indicating poorer narrative memory of described situations for all noise conditions compared to quiet. Increased positive responses to thematically consistent but situationally "wrong" memory probes drove this effect. No other significant effects were observed. CONCLUSION Despite near-perfect speech recognition, background noise negatively influenced aspects of spoken narrative comprehension and memory. Specifically, noise did not disrupt memory for what was said (surface form and propositional memory), but only memory for what was talked about (event model memory).
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Affiliation(s)
- Peter A Wasiuk
- Department of Psychological Sciences, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH, USA
| | | | - Robert L Greene
- Department of Psychological Sciences, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH, USA
| | - Lauren Calandruccio
- Department of Psychological Sciences, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH, USA
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Payne BR, Silcox JW. Aging, context processing, and comprehension. PSYCHOLOGY OF LEARNING AND MOTIVATION 2019. [DOI: 10.1016/bs.plm.2019.07.001] [Citation(s) in RCA: 11] [Impact Index Per Article: 2.2] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 12/28/2022]
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Ng S, Payne BR, Stine-Morrow EA, Federmeier KD. How struggling adult readers use contextual information when comprehending speech: Evidence from event-related potentials. Int J Psychophysiol 2018; 125:1-9. [DOI: 10.1016/j.ijpsycho.2018.01.013] [Citation(s) in RCA: 14] [Impact Index Per Article: 2.3] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 08/17/2017] [Revised: 01/26/2018] [Accepted: 01/28/2018] [Indexed: 01/16/2023]
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Ward CM, Rogers CS, Van Engen KJ, Peelle JE. Effects of Age, Acoustic Challenge, and Verbal Working Memory on Recall of Narrative Speech. Exp Aging Res 2016; 42:97-111. [PMID: 26683044 DOI: 10.1080/0361073x.2016.1108785] [Citation(s) in RCA: 35] [Impact Index Per Article: 4.4] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 10/22/2022]
Abstract
BACKGROUND/STUDY CONTEXT A common goal during speech comprehension is to remember what we have heard. Encoding speech into long-term memory frequently requires processes such as verbal working memory that may also be involved in processing degraded speech. Here the authors tested whether young and older adult listeners' memory for short stories was worse when the stories were acoustically degraded, or whether the additional contextual support provided by a narrative would protect against these effects. METHODS The authors tested 30 young adults (aged 18-28 years) and 30 older adults (aged 65-79 years) with good self-reported hearing. Participants heard short stories that were presented as normal (unprocessed) speech or acoustically degraded using a noise vocoding algorithm with 24 or 16 channels. The degraded stories were still fully intelligible. Following each story, participants were asked to repeat the story in as much detail as possible. Recall was scored using a modified idea unit scoring approach, which included separately scoring hierarchical levels of narrative detail. RESULTS Memory for acoustically degraded stories was significantly worse than for normal stories at some levels of narrative detail. Older adults' memory for the stories was significantly worse overall, but there was no interaction between age and acoustic clarity or level of narrative detail. Verbal working memory (assessed by reading span) significantly correlated with recall accuracy for both young and older adults, whereas hearing ability (better ear pure tone average) did not. CONCLUSION The present findings are consistent with a framework in which the additional cognitive demands caused by a degraded acoustic signal use resources that would otherwise be available for memory encoding for both young and older adults. Verbal working memory is a likely candidate for supporting both of these processes.
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Affiliation(s)
- Caitlin M Ward
- a Department of Otolaryngology , Washington University in St. Louis , St. Louis , Missouri , USA
| | - Chad S Rogers
- a Department of Otolaryngology , Washington University in St. Louis , St. Louis , Missouri , USA
| | - Kristin J Van Engen
- b Department of Psychology , Washington University in St. Louis , St. Louis , Missouri , USA
| | - Jonathan E Peelle
- a Department of Otolaryngology , Washington University in St. Louis , St. Louis , Missouri , USA
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Noh SR, Isaacowitz DM. The effects of varying contextual demands on age-related positive gaze preferences. Psychol Aging 2016; 30:356-68. [PMID: 26030774 DOI: 10.1037/a0039233] [Citation(s) in RCA: 6] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.8] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 11/08/2022]
Abstract
Despite many studies on the age-related positivity effect and its role in visual attention, discrepancies remain regarding whether full attention is required for age-related differences to emerge. The present study took a new approach to this question by varying the contextual demands of emotion processing. This was done by adding perceptual distractions, such as visual and auditory noise, that could disrupt attentional control. Younger and older participants viewed pairs of happy-neutral and fearful-neutral faces while their eye movements were recorded. Facial stimuli were shown either without noise, embedded in a background of visual noise (low, medium, or high), or with simultaneous auditory babble. Older adults showed positive gaze preferences, looking toward happy faces and away from fearful faces; however, their gaze preferences tended to be influenced by the level of visual noise. Specifically, the tendency to look away from fearful faces was not present in conditions with low and medium levels of visual noise but was present when there were high levels of visual noise. It is important to note, however, that in the high-visual-noise condition, external cues were present to facilitate the processing of emotional information. In addition, older adults' positive gaze preferences disappeared or were reduced when they first viewed emotional faces within a distracting context. The current results indicate that positive gaze preferences may be less likely to occur in distracting contexts that disrupt control of visual attention.
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DeCaro R, Peelle JE, Grossman M, Wingfield A. The Two Sides of Sensory-Cognitive Interactions: Effects of Age, Hearing Acuity, and Working Memory Span on Sentence Comprehension. Front Psychol 2016; 7:236. [PMID: 26973557 PMCID: PMC4770018 DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00236] [Citation(s) in RCA: 33] [Impact Index Per Article: 4.1] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 09/01/2015] [Accepted: 02/05/2016] [Indexed: 12/05/2022] Open
Abstract
Reduced hearing acuity is among the most prevalent of chronic medical conditions among older adults. An experiment is reported in which comprehension of spoken sentences was tested for older adults with good hearing acuity or with a mild-to-moderate hearing loss, and young adults with age-normal hearing. Comprehension was measured by participants’ ability to determine the agent of an action in sentences that expressed this relation with a syntactically less complex subject-relative construction or a syntactically more complex object-relative construction. Agency determination was further challenged by inserting a prepositional phrase into sentences between the person performing an action and the action being performed. As a control, prepositional phrases of equivalent length were also inserted into sentences in a non-disruptive position. Effects on sentence comprehension of age, hearing acuity, prepositional phrase placement and sound level of stimulus presentations appeared only for comprehension of sentences with the more syntactically complex object-relative structures. Working memory as tested by reading span scores accounted for a significant amount of the variance in comprehension accuracy. Once working memory capacity and hearing acuity were taken into account, chronological age among the older adults contributed no further variance to comprehension accuracy. Results are discussed in terms of the positive and negative effects of sensory–cognitive interactions in comprehension of spoken sentences and lend support to a framework in which domain-general executive resources, notably verbal working memory, play a role in both linguistic and perceptual processing.
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Affiliation(s)
- Renee DeCaro
- Department of Psychology and Volen National Center for Complex Systems, Brandeis University, Waltham MA, USA
| | - Jonathan E Peelle
- Department of Otolaryngology, Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis MO, USA
| | - Murray Grossman
- Department of Neurology, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia PA, USA
| | - Arthur Wingfield
- Department of Psychology and Volen National Center for Complex Systems, Brandeis University, Waltham MA, USA
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Stine-Morrow EAL. Commentary on Mata and von Helversen: Foraging Theory as a Paradigm Shift for Cognitive Aging. Top Cogn Sci 2015; 7:535-42. [PMID: 25994491 DOI: 10.1111/tops.12149] [Citation(s) in RCA: 1] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.1] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 01/20/2014] [Accepted: 09/05/2014] [Indexed: 11/30/2022]
Abstract
Mata and von Helversen's integrative review of adult age differences in search performance makes a good case that cognitive control may impact certain aspects of self-regulation of search. However, information foraging as a framework also offers an avenue to consider how adults of different ages adapt to age-related changes in cognition, such as in cognitive control.
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Dekerle M, Boulenger V, Hoen M, Meunier F. Multi-talker background and semantic priming effect. Front Hum Neurosci 2014; 8:878. [PMID: 25400572 PMCID: PMC4215827 DOI: 10.3389/fnhum.2014.00878] [Citation(s) in RCA: 5] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.5] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 03/20/2014] [Accepted: 10/12/2014] [Indexed: 11/21/2022] Open
Abstract
The reported studies have aimed to investigate whether informational masking in a multi-talker background relies on semantic interference between the background and target using an adapted semantic priming paradigm. In 3 experiments, participants were required to perform a lexical decision task on a target item embedded in backgrounds composed of 1–4 voices. These voices were Semantically Consistent (SC) voices (i.e., pronouncing words sharing semantic features with the target) or Semantically Inconsistent (SI) voices (i.e., pronouncing words semantically unrelated to each other and to the target). In the first experiment, backgrounds consisted of 1 or 2 SC voices. One and 2 SI voices were added in Experiments 2 and 3, respectively. The results showed a semantic priming effect only in the conditions where the number of SC voices was greater than the number of SI voices, suggesting that semantic priming depended on prime intelligibility and strategic processes. However, even if backgrounds were composed of 3 or 4 voices, reducing intelligibility, participants were able to recognize words from these backgrounds, although no semantic priming effect on the targets was observed. Overall this finding suggests that informational masking can occur at a semantic level if intelligibility is sufficient. Based on the Effortfulness Hypothesis, we also suggest that when there is an increased difficulty in extracting target signals (caused by a relatively high number of voices in the background), more cognitive resources were allocated to formal processes (i.e., acoustic and phonological), leading to a decrease in available resources for deeper semantic processing of background words, therefore preventing semantic priming from occurring.
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Affiliation(s)
- Marie Dekerle
- Laboratoire sur le Langage, le Cerveau et la Cognition, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, UMR 5304 Lyon, France ; University of Lyon Lyon, France
| | - Véronique Boulenger
- University of Lyon Lyon, France ; Laboratoire Dynamique Du Langage, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, UMR5596 Lyon, France
| | - Michel Hoen
- University of Lyon Lyon, France ; Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, UMR5292, Institut National de la Santé et de la Recherche Médicale, U1028, Lyon Neuroscience Research Center, Brain Dynamics and Cognition Team Lyon, France
| | - Fanny Meunier
- Laboratoire sur le Langage, le Cerveau et la Cognition, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, UMR 5304 Lyon, France ; University of Lyon Lyon, France
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Easy methods for extracting individual regression slopes: Comparing SPSS, R, and Excel. TUTORIALS IN QUANTITATIVE METHODS FOR PSYCHOLOGY 2013. [DOI: 10.20982/tqmp.09.2.p072] [Citation(s) in RCA: 39] [Impact Index Per Article: 3.5] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 11/21/2022] Open
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