Subject: repetition effects for speech-in-noise: summary From: Stuart Rosen <stuart@xxxxxxxx> Date: Fri, 24 Mar 2006 12:08:18 +0000Earlier in the month, I asked the following question: Can anyone refer me to studies of the effects of repeating items when testing, for example, identification of words in noise or other degradations? I myself have seen someone do much better with noise-vocoded sentences because he had been in a study using the same material more than a year previously! There is a large, somewhat related literature concerning semantic and repetition priming, but that is not quite the task I am interested in. Thanks to all who sent the following responses: ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Christophe Pallier www.pallier.org Steve Goldinger (JEPLMC 1996) studied repetition using a task of word identification in noise (See also Church & Schacter (JEPLMC 1994). Anecdotally, we observed that people once exposed to very fast speech seem to retain an advantage days or months later (Mehler et al., Understanding compressed sentences: the role of rhythm and meaning. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 682:272-282, 1993). Not sure if we reported it. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Bill Yund yund@xxxxxxxx We were concerned in finding a study (Wilson RH, Bell TS, Koslowski JA. Learning effects associated with repeated word-recognition measures using sentence materials. J Rehabil Res Dev 2003;40(4):329-36.) demonstrating that the speech reception threshold (SRT) in quiet improved with repeated testing, but just as much with new sentences as with sentences repeated over five 1-hr sessions. If similar SRT improvement occurs with other sentence tests, and even in the presence of noise, that could make such tests useless for tracking speech perception changes over time. We are just finishing running the HINT sentence test with noise, in the Wilson-Bell-Koslowski (WBK) design. Our results are what you would expect, if you didn't know about the WBK results. We find improvement for repeated, but not for new sentences. We will submit a short report to J Rehabil Res Dev, with some explanations for the different results, which should be ready in a week or two. We would be happy to send you a copy of the manuscript as soon as it is fit for someone else to look at, if you like. I would also be interested in any other leads you get on your question; I have not been very successful in finding other similar studies. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- trevoragus@xxxxxxxx Trevor Agus (PhD Student, MRC Institute of Hearing Research Scottish Section) There's a section about open-set and closed-set speech reception in Green & Swets "Signal Detection Theory and Psychophysics" that may be relevant to you. In section 11.3.1 there's a graph showing results of a listener is listening to speech signals from closed sets of different sizes. In my own experiments, I've noticed that people seem to get familiar with the 'style' (syntax/vocab/length) of the ASL sentence-lists - their incorrect guesses can be quite wide-of-the-mark near the start, but after a few sets, their incorrect guesses sound like parodies of the original sentences. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- /*------------------------------------------------------*/ Stuart Rosen, PhD Professor of Speech and Hearing Science Dept of Phonetics & Linguistics University College London 4 Stephenson Way London NW1 2HE England Directions to Wolfson House (where I am based): http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/dept/maps.html Tel: (+ 44 [0]20) 7679 7404 Admin: (+ 44 [0]20) 7679 7401 Fax: (+ 44 [0]20) 7679 5107 Email: stuart@xxxxxxxx Home page: http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/stuart/home.htm /*------------------------------------------------------*/