dissertation - NU Linguistics home page. - Northwestern University
dissertation - NU Linguistics home page. - Northwestern University dissertation - NU Linguistics home page. - Northwestern University
! 24English a more effective masker than Mandarin for native English listeners. Indeed, participantsoften transcribed entire words from the babble tracks in their responses, indicating thatinterference did occur at this level.The current study aims to begin to identify the locus of the noise language effect by comparingthe effects of English 2-talker babble with English 2-talker babble composed of sentences whosecontent words are, in fact, non-words (words that are phonologically legal in English but are notreal words). This study will allow us to determine whether the simple presence of Englishcontent words in the background noise drives the greater interference listeners experienced withEnglish babble or whether sub-lexical features of English noise (still present in the non-wordnoise) may be equally as detrimental to target sentence recognition as real words.MethodsParticipantsSeventeen participants were recruited from the Northwestern community and paid for theirparticipation. All participants were between the ages of 18 and 35, were native speakers ofAmerican English, and reported no history of problems with speech or hearing. The data fromone participant were excluded from analysis because the individual was outside the required agerange.MaterialsTarget sentences
! 25The same target sentence recordings were used as in Van Engen and Bradlow (2007). Therecordings, produced by a female, native speaker of American English were made for anunrelated study (Bent and Bradlow, 2003). The sentences were from the Revised Bamford-Kowal-Bench Standard Sentence Test (BKB sentences), lists 7-10. Each list contains 16 simple,meaningful English sentences (e.g., The children dropped the bag.) and 50 keywords (3-4 persentence). Lists 7, 8, 9, and 10 were chosen for Van Engen and Bradlow (2007) and this studybased on their approximately equivalent intelligibility scores for normal children (Bamford andWilson, 1979). All sentence recordings were equated for RMS amplitude.NoiseThe semantically anomalous sentences used to generate babble in Van Engen and Bradlow(2007) (20 sentences created by Smiljanic and Bradlow, 2005) were recorded by two new femalespeakers of American English. These talkers also recorded a second version of the sentence set,in which all of the content words were converted to non-words by manipulating onsets, codas, orvowels. For example, the real-word sentence “Your tedious beacon lifted our cab” was convertedto “Your bedious reacon loofted our bab.” (The two sentence lists can be found in Appendix A.)Four short babble tracks were created from each sentence set following the procedure describedin Van Engen and Bradlow (2007) and again in Chapter 3 of this dissertation. The noise trackswere equated for RMS amplitude at three levels relative to the level of the target sentences toproduce SNRs of +5 dB, 0 dB, -5 dB.
- Page 1: NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITYLinguistic f
- Page 5 and 6: ! 5ACKNOWLEDGEMENTSFirst and foremo
- Page 7 and 8: ! 7TABLE OF CONTENTSAbstract.......
- Page 9 and 10: ! 9Mixing target sentences and nois
- Page 11 and 12: ! 11LIST OF TABLESTable 2.1: Differ
- Page 13 and 14: ! 13environment is one of the most
- Page 15 and 16: ! 15difficult for any listener. Hea
- Page 17 and 18: ! 17One useful method for assessing
- Page 19 and 20: ! 19(2007), which showed that nativ
- Page 21 and 22: ! 21particular task may not be sens
- Page 23: ! 23CHAPTER 2: TWO FOLLOW-UP STUDIE
- Page 27 and 28: ! 27ResultsThe data from the 0 dB a
- Page 29 and 30: ! 29Experiment 2: An investigation
- Page 31 and 32: ! 31experiment (Method 2) are shown
- Page 33 and 34: ! 33Figure 2.2. Keyword identificat
- Page 35 and 36: ! 35CHAPTER 3: SIMILARITY AND FAMIL
- Page 37 and 38: ! 37be more detrimental than foreig
- Page 42 and 43: ! 42Spanish listeners on L2 (Englis
- Page 44 and 45: ! 44attributed solely to the acoust
- Page 46 and 47: ! 46study. For the following reason
- Page 48 and 49: ! 48effects in 2-talker babble as c
- Page 50 and 51: ! 50The full set of target sentence
- Page 52 and 53: ! 52their best guess if they were u
- Page 54 and 55: ! 54Figure 3.1. HINT threshold scor
- Page 56 and 57: ! 56data are analyzed as proportion
- Page 58 and 59: ! 58regression showed a significant
- Page 60 and 61: ! 60also a component of information
- Page 62 and 63: ! 62for the different outcomes. Fir
- Page 64 and 65: ! 64the native Mandarin listeners h
- Page 66 and 67: ! 66on this finding and extends the
- Page 68 and 69: ! 68by age 8 and considered themsel
- Page 70 and 71: ! 70!"#$%&'()*"*$%"#+,$($%&-."./&(8
- Page 72 and 73: ! 72suppress bilingual performance
! 24English a more effective masker than Mandarin for native English listeners. Indeed, participantsoften transcribed entire words from the babble tracks in their responses, indicating thatinterference did occur at this level.The current study aims to begin to identify the locus of the noise language effect by comparingthe effects of English 2-talker babble with English 2-talker babble composed of sentences whosecontent words are, in fact, non-words (words that are phonologically legal in English but are notreal words). This study will allow us to determine whether the simple presence of Englishcontent words in the background noise drives the greater interference listeners experienced withEnglish babble or whether sub-lexical features of English noise (still present in the non-wordnoise) may be equally as detrimental to target sentence recognition as real words.MethodsParticipantsSeventeen participants were recruited from the <strong>Northwestern</strong> community and paid for theirparticipation. All participants were between the ages of 18 and 35, were native speakers ofAmerican English, and reported no history of problems with speech or hearing. The data fromone participant were excluded from analysis because the individual was outside the required agerange.MaterialsTarget sentences
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