SBP: How does improved speech perception impact higher-level processing?

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When people listen to other talkers, they experience many different voices and accents. Although unfamiliar talkers and those with unfamiliar accents are often less intelligible to a listener, intelligibility improves as the listener becomes more familiar with the talker. In this proposal, the investigators examine whether there is a similar impact on the comprehension or understanding of a talker’s intended message. That is, does lack of familiarity with a talker or with a specific foreign accent negatively impact comprehension or memory, even when intelligibility is unimpaired? For example, does listening to an unfamiliar teacher in a classroom (e.g., a substitute teacher) make it harder to understand and remember the content of the lesson? Our society includes people with many different accents, both regional US and international. If a person’s accent interferes with a listener’s comprehension or memory for a conversation, even if all the words are accurately perceived, this could influence how the person is perceived. For example, if comprehension and memory for the conversation is enhanced when the talker’s accent is familiar, it could perpetuate current biases in educational and occupational opportunities. In a job interview, people with unfamiliar accents would be judged as less understandable and hence less qualified than those with the interviewer’s accent. In the current project, the investigators will examine the extent to which familiarity with a talker’s voice or a specific foreign accent improves memory. This will be accomplished by first familiarizing listeners with a specific talker or foreign accent and then testing whether words and phrases said by those people are remembered better than words and phrases said by unfamiliar people or by talkers with an unfamiliar foreign accent. In addition, they will examine the extent to which familiarity improves listeners’ memory for new information presented in a longer lecture. The results should allow development of a framework for understanding how challenging listening situations impact memory and comprehension and how to ameliorate the effects through auditory training paradigms.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.