Assessing the effects of "native speaker" status on classic findings in speech research.

It is common practice in speech research to only sample participants who self-report being "native English speakers." Although there is research on differences in language processing between native and nonnative listeners (see Lecumberri et al., 2010, for a review), the majority of speech research that aims to establish general findings (e.

Noisy speech impairs retention of previously heard information only at short time scales.

When speech is presented in noise, listeners must recruit cognitive resources to resolve the mismatch between the noisy input and representations in memory. A consequence of this effortful listening is impaired memory for content presented earlier. In the first study on effortful listening, Rabbitt, The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 20, 241-248 (1968; Experiment 2) found that recall for a list of digits was poorer when subsequent digits were presented with masking noise than without.

The effects of temporal cues, point-light displays, and faces on speech identification and listening effort.

Among the most robust findings in speech research is that the presence of a talking face improves the intelligibility of spoken language. Talking faces supplement the auditory signal by providing fine phonetic cues based on the placement of the articulators, as well as temporal cues to when speech is occurring. In this study, we varied the amount of information contained in the visual signal, ranging from temporal information alone to a natural talking face.

Spread the Word: Enhancing Replicability of Speech Research Through Stimulus Sharing.

Purpose: The ongoing replication crisis within and beyond psychology has revealed the numerous ways in which flexibility in the research process can affect study outcomes. In speech research, examples of these "researcher degrees of freedom" include the particular syllables, words, or sentences presented; the talkers who produce the stimuli and the instructions given to them; the population tested; whether and how stimuli are matched on amplitude; the type of masking noise used and its presentation level; and many others. In this research note, we argue that even seemingly minor methodological choices have the potential to affect study outcomes.

Error tight: Exercises for lab groups to prevent research mistakes.

Scientists, being human, make mistakes. We transcribe things incorrectly, we make errors in our code, and we intend to do things and then forget. The consequences of errors in research may be as minor as wasted time and annoyance, but may be as severe as losing months of work or having to retract an article.

Preregistration: Practical Considerations for Speech, Language, and Hearing Research.

Purpose: In the last decade, psychology and other sciences have implemented numerous reforms to improve the robustness of our research, many of which are based on increasing transparency throughout the research process. Among these reforms is the practice of preregistration, in which researchers create a time-stamped and uneditable document before data collection that describes the methods of the study, how the data will be analyzed, the sample size, and many other decisions. The current article highlights the benefits of preregistration with a focus on the specific issues that speech, language, and hearing researchers are likely to encounter, and additionally provides a tutorial for writing preregistrations.

Speech and non-speech measures of audiovisual integration are not correlated.

Many natural events generate both visual and auditory signals, and humans are remarkably adept at integrating information from those sources. However, individuals appear to differ markedly in their ability or propensity to combine what they hear with what they see. Individual differences in audiovisual integration have been established using a range of materials, including speech stimuli (seeing and hearing a talker) and simpler audiovisual stimuli (seeing flashes of light combined with tones).

Revisiting the target-masker linguistic similarity hypothesis.

The linguistic similarity hypothesis states that it is more difficult to segregate target and masker speech when they are linguistically similar. For example, recognition of English target speech should be more impaired by the presence of Dutch masking speech than Mandarin masking speech because Dutch and English are more linguistically similar than Mandarin and English. Across four experiments, English target speech was consistently recognized more poorly when presented in English masking speech than in silence, speech-shaped noise, or an unintelligible masker (i.

"Where are the . . . Fixations?": Grammatical number cues guide anticipatory fixations to upcoming referents and reduce lexical competition.

Listeners make use of contextual cues during continuous speech processing that help overcome the limitations of the acoustic input. These semantic, grammatical, and pragmatic cues facilitate prediction of upcoming words and/or reduce the lexical search space by inhibiting activation of contextually inappropriate words that share phonological information with the target. The current study used the visual world paradigm to assess whether and how listeners use contextual cues about grammatical number during sentence processing by presenting target words in carrier phrases that were grammatically unconstraining ("Click on the .

Putting the Self in Self-Correction: Findings From the Loss-of-Confidence Project.

Science is often perceived to be a self-correcting enterprise. In principle, the assessment of scientific claims is supposed to proceed in a cumulative fashion, with the reigning theories of the day progressively approximating truth more accurately over time. In practice, however, cumulative self-correction tends to proceed less efficiently than one might naively suppose.

Rapid adaptation to fully intelligible nonnative-accented speech reduces listening effort.

In noisy settings or when listening to an unfamiliar talker or accent, it can be difficult to understand spoken language. This difficulty typically results in reductions in speech intelligibility, but may also increase the effort necessary to process the speech even when intelligibility is unaffected. In this study, we used a dual-task paradigm and pupillometry to assess the cognitive costs associated with processing fully intelligible accented speech, predicting that rapid perceptual adaptation to an accent would result in decreased listening effort over time.

Talking Points: A Modulating Circle Increases Listening Effort Without Improving Speech Recognition in Young Adults.

Speech recognition is improved when the acoustic input is accompanied by visual cues provided by a talking face (Erber in Journal of Speech and Hearing Research, 12(2), 423-425, 1969; Sumby & Pollack in The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 26(2), 212-215, 1954). One way that the visual signal facilitates speech recognition is by providing the listener with information about fine phonetic detail that complements information from the auditory signal. However, given that degraded face stimuli can still improve speech recognition accuracy (Munhall, Kroos, Jozan, & Vatikiotis-Bateson in Perception & Psychophysics, 66(4), 574-583, 2004), and static or moving shapes can improve speech detection accuracy (Bernstein, Auer, & Takayanagi in Speech Communication, 44(1-4), 5-18, 2004), aspects of the visual signal other than fine phonetic detail may also contribute to the perception of speech.

Understanding Speech Amid the Jingle and Jangle: Recommendations for Improving Measurement Practices in Listening Effort Research.

The latent constructs psychologists study are typically not directly accessible, so researchers must design measurement instruments that are intended to provide insights about those constructs. Construct validation-assessing whether instruments measure what they intend to-is therefore critical for ensuring that the conclusions we draw actually reflect the intended phenomena. Insufficient construct validation can lead to the falsely assuming two instruments measure the same construct because the instruments share a name (Thorndike, 1904)-and the falsely assuming two instruments measure different constructs because the instruments have different names (Kelley, 1927).

Recall of Speech is Impaired by Subsequent Masking Noise: A Replication of Experiment 2.

Introduction: The presence of masking noise can impair speech intelligibility and increase the attentional and cognitive resources necessary to understand speech. The first study to demonstrate the negative cognitive effects of noisy speech found that participants had poorer recall for aurally-presented digits early in a list when later digits were presented in noise relative to quiet (Rabbitt, 1968). However, despite being cited nearly 500 times and providing the foundation for a wealth of subsequent research on the topic, the original study has never been directly replicated.

About Face: Seeing the Talker Improves Spoken Word Recognition but Increases Listening Effort.

It is widely accepted that seeing a talker improves a listener's ability to understand what a talker is saying in background noise (e.g., Erber, 1969; Sumby & Pollack, 1954).

The Danger of Testing by Selecting Controlled Subsets, with Applications to Spoken-Word Recognition.

When examining the effects of a continuous variable on an outcome , a researcher might choose to dichotomize on , dividing the population into two sets-low and high -and testing whether these two subpopulations differ with respect to . Dichotomization has long been known to incur a cost in statistical power, but there remain circumstances in which it is appealing: an experimenter might use it to control for confounding covariates through subset selection, by carefully choosing a subpopulation of Low and a corresponding subpopulation of High that are balanced with respect to a list of control variables, and then comparing the subpopulations' values. This "divide, select, and test" approach is used in many papers throughout the psycholinguistics literature, and elsewhere.

"Paying" attention to audiovisual speech: Do incongruent stimuli incur greater costs?

The McGurk effect is a multisensory phenomenon in which discrepant auditory and visual speech signals typically result in an illusory percept. McGurk stimuli are often used in studies assessing the attentional requirements of audiovisual integration, but no study has directly compared the costs associated with integrating congruent versus incongruent audiovisual speech. Some evidence suggests that the McGurk effect may not be representative of naturalistic audiovisual speech processing - susceptibility to the McGurk effect is not associated with the ability to derive benefit from the addition of the visual signal, and distinct cortical regions are recruited when processing congruent versus incongruent speech.

What accounts for individual differences in susceptibility to the McGurk effect?

The McGurk effect is a classic audiovisual speech illusion in which discrepant auditory and visual syllables can lead to a fused percept (e.g., an auditory /bɑ/ paired with a visual /gɑ/ often leads to the perception of /dɑ/).

Measuring Listening Effort: Convergent Validity, Sensitivity, and Links With Cognitive and Personality Measures.

Purpose: Listening effort (LE) describes the attentional or cognitive requirements for successful listening. Despite substantial theoretical and clinical interest in LE, inconsistent operationalization makes it difficult to make generalizations across studies. The aims of this large-scale validation study were to evaluate the convergent validity and sensitivity of commonly used measures of LE and assess how scores on those tasks relate to cognitive and personality variables.

Talking points: A modulating circle reduces listening effort without improving speech recognition.

Speech recognition is improved when the acoustic input is accompanied by visual cues provided by a talking face (Erber in Journal of Speech and Hearing Research, 12(2), 423-425 1969; Sumby & Pollack in The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 26(2), 212-215, 1954). One way that the visual signal facilitates speech recognition is by providing the listener with information about fine phonetic detail that complements information from the auditory signal. However, given that degraded face stimuli can still improve speech recognition accuracy (Munhall et al.

Keep listening: Grammatical context reduces but does not eliminate activation of unexpected words.

To understand spoken language, listeners combine acoustic-phonetic input with expectations derived from context (Dahan & Magnuson, 2006). Eye-tracking studies on semantic context have demonstrated that the activation levels of competing lexical candidates depend on the relative strengths of the bottom-up input and top-down expectations (cf. Dahan & Tanenhaus, 2004).

Conducting spoken word recognition research online: Validation and a new timing method.

Models of spoken word recognition typically make predictions that are then tested in the laboratory against the word recognition scores of human subjects (e.g., Luce & Pisoni Ear and Hearing, 19, 1-36, 1998).

Individual differences in susceptibility to the McGurk effect: links with lipreading and detecting audiovisual incongruity.

Purpose: Prior studies (e.g., Nath & Beauchamp, 2012) report large individual variability in the extent to which participants are susceptible to the McGurk effect, a prominent audiovisual (AV) speech illusion.

Grammatical context constrains lexical competition in spoken word recognition.

When perceiving spoken language, listeners must match the incoming acoustic phonetic input to lexical representations in memory. Models that quantify this process propose that the input activates multiple lexical representations in parallel and that these activated representations compete for recognition (Weber & Scharenborg, 2012). In two experiments, we assessed how grammatically constraining contexts alter the process of lexical competition.