Perceptual restoration is a phenomenon that people experience in daily situations when making sense of speech in adverse conditions. For example, when people listen to a public announcement at the airport, that announcement can be disrupted by random noise, but listeners are usually successful in understanding speech. This is because listeners perceptually restore disrupted portions of speech by integrating different kinds of cues and making sense of what was being said. The current study explores what kinds of cues are adopted in the perceptual restoration of disrupted speech in listeners’ first and second language by reviewing past research projects (Ishida, Samuel, and Arai, 2016; Ishida & Arai, 2016; Ishida, 2021). These projects explored how listeners perceive words and pseudowords where a speech signal was partially or entirely distorted. For the partial distortion of speech, listeners listened to words and pseudowords where a phoneme in a word or pseudoword was deleted and replaced by noise. For the entire distortion of speech, listeners listened to words and pseudowords where every X-ms of speech signal was flipped in time. Here, the possible cues for perceptual restoration examined were lexical factors (word vs. pseudoword), phonemic factors (e.g., liquid vs. nasal), acoustic factors (presence vs. absence of a phoneme sound), and linguistic factors (first vs. second language). The results suggested that the biggest difference between the perceptual restoration by native and non-native listeners was the availability of lexical information, and acoustic and phonemic factors tended to be similarly processed in the first and second languages.

Authors:
Mako Ishida, Keio University, Japan

About the Presenter(s)
Dr Mako Ishida is a University Assistant Professor/Lecturer at Keio University in Japan

See this presentation on the full schedule – Schedule

Bookmark