The effect of visual speech information on linguistic release from masking.

Listeners often experience challenges understanding a person (target) in the presence of competing talkers (maskers). This difficulty reduces with the availability of visual speech information (VSI; lip movements, degree of mouth opening) and during linguistic release from masking (LRM; masking decreases with dissimilar language maskers). We investigate whether and how LRM occurs with VSI.

Would you respect a norm if it sounds foreign? Foreign-accented speech affects decision-making processes.

Does listening to a foreign-accented speaker bias native speakers' behavior? We investigated whether the accent, i.e., a foreign accent versus a native accent, in which a social norm is presented affects native speakers' decision to respect the norm (Experiments 1 and 2) and the judgement for not respecting it (Experiment 2).

The Effects of Being Informed About Chemotherapy-Related Cognitive Symptoms With And Without Self-Affirmation on Perceived Cognitive Symptoms of Breast Cancer Patients: A Randomized Prospective, Longitudinal Study.

Background: Informing patients about chemotherapy-related cognitive symptoms (CRCS) may increase perceived cognitive symptoms. This longitudinal randomized study evaluated this Adverse Information Effect (AIE) in breast cancer patients and examined whether self-affirmation (SA) can reduce AIEs (ClinicalTrials.gov identifier: NCT04813965).

The Effects of Iconic Gestures and Babble Language on Word Intelligibility in Sentence Context.

Purpose: This study investigated to what extent iconic co-speech gestures help word intelligibility in sentence context in two different linguistic maskers (native vs. foreign). It was hypothesized that sentence recognition improves with the presence of iconic co-speech gestures and with foreign compared to native babble.

Is There a Foreign Effect on Moral Judgment?

Recent studies have shown that people make more utilitarian decisions when dealing with a moral dilemma in a foreign language than in their native language. Emotion, cognitive load, and psychological distance have been put forward as explanations for this foreign effect. The question that arises is whether a similar effect would be observed when processing a dilemma in one's own language but spoken by a foreign-accented speaker.

Individual Differences in Children's (Language) Learning Skills Moderate Effects of Robot-Assisted Second Language Learning.

The current study investigated how individual differences among children affect the added value of social robots for teaching second language (L2) vocabulary to young children. Specifically, we investigated the moderating role of three individual child characteristics deemed relevant for language learning: first language (L1) vocabulary knowledge, phonological memory, and selective attention. We expected children low in these abilities to particularly benefit from being assisted by a robot in a vocabulary training.

"Lass frooby noo!" the interference of song lyrics and meaning on speech intelligibility.

This study examined whether song lyrics and their semantic meaning interfere with speech intelligibility. In three experiments, a total of 108 native Dutch participants listened to Dutch target sentences in the presence of three versions of the pop songs (Experiment 1) or (Experiment 2a and 2b) by singer Katy Perry at different signal-to-noise ratios. The versions consisted of the original English songs, the karaoke versions of the songs without lyrics, and anomalous versions of the songs in the fictional language , which was created for the video game .

Word Recognition and Word Prediction in Preschoolers With (a Suspicion of) a Developmental Language Disorder: Evidence From Eye Tracking.

Purpose This study compares online word recognition and prediction in preschoolers with (a suspicion of) a developmental language disorder (DLD) and typically developing (TD) controls. Furthermore, it investigates correlations between these measures and the link between online and off-line language scores in the DLD group. Method Using the visual world paradigm, Dutch children ages 3;6 (years;months) with (a suspicion of) DLD ( = 51) and TD peers ( = 31) listened to utterances such as, "Kijk, een hoed!" () in a word recognition task, and sentences such as, "Hé, hij leest gewoon een boek" (literal translation: ) in a word prediction task, while watching a target and distractor picture.

A Tale of Two Modalities: Sign and Speech Influence Each Other in Bimodal Bilinguals.

Bimodal bilinguals are hearing individuals fluent in a sign and a spoken language. Can the two languages influence each other in such individuals despite differences in the visual (sign) and vocal (speech) modalities of expression? We investigated cross-linguistic influences on bimodal bilinguals' expression of spatial relations. Unlike spoken languages, sign uses iconic linguistic forms that resemble physical features of objects in a spatial relation and thus expresses specific semantic information.

Iconicity in spatial language guides visual attention: A comparison between signers' and speakers' eye gaze during message preparation.

To talk about space, spoken languages rely on arbitrary and categorical forms (e.g., left, right).

The role of foreign accent and short-term exposure in speech-in-speech recognition.

Daily speech communication often takes place in suboptimal listening conditions, in which interlocutors typically need to segregate the target signal from the background sounds. The present study investigated the influence on speech recognition of a relatively familiar foreign accent in background speech (Exp. 1) and whether short-term immediate exposure to the target talker's voice (Exp.

Verb-based prediction during language processing: the case of Dutch and Turkish.

This study investigated whether cross-linguistic differences affect semantic prediction. We assessed this by looking at two languages, Dutch and Turkish, that differ in word order and thus vary in how words come together to create sentence meaning. In an eye-tracking task, Dutch and Turkish four-year-olds (N = 40), five-year-olds (N = 58), and adults (N = 40) were presented with a visual display containing two familiar objects (e.

How Native Prosody Affects Pitch Processing during Word Learning in Limburgian and Dutch Toddlers and Adults.

In this study, Limburgian and Dutch 2.5- to 4-year-olds and adults took part in a word learning experiment. Following the procedure employed by Quam and Swingley (2010) and Singh et al.

Masking release effects of a standard and a regional linguistic variety.

Previous research has shown that the more similar the target and the masker signal, the harder it is to segregate the two streams effectively [i.e., target-masker linguistic similarity hypothesis, e.

No perceptual reorganization for Limburgian tones? A cross-linguistic investigation with 6- to 12-month-old infants.

Despite the fact that many of the world's languages use lexical tone, the majority of language acquisition studies has focused on non-tone languages. Research on tone languages has typically investigated well-known tone languages such as Mandarin and Cantonese Chinese. The current study looked at a Limburgian dialect of Dutch that uses lexical pitch differences, albeit in a rather restricted way.

Processing grammatical gender in Dutch: Evidence from eye movements.

Previous research has demonstrated that grammatical gender in Dutch is typically acquired late. Most of this work used production data only, and consequently children's knowledge of Dutch gender may have been underestimated. In this study, therefore, we examined whether 49 4- to 7-year-old Dutch-speaking children (and 19 adult controls) were able to use gender marking in the article preceding the object label during online sentence processing to (a) anticipate the upcoming object label or to (b) facilitate the processing of that label as it is presented.

The Temporal Dynamics of Spoken Word Recognition in Adverse Listening Conditions.

This study examined the temporal dynamics of spoken word recognition in noise and background speech. In two visual-world experiments, English participants listened to target words while looking at four pictures on the screen: a target (e.g.

Delayed Anticipatory Spoken Language Processing in Adults with Dyslexia—Evidence from Eye-tracking.

It is now well established that anticipation of upcoming input is a key characteristic of spoken language comprehension. It has also frequently been observed that literacy influences spoken language processing. Here, we investigated whether anticipatory spoken language processing is related to individuals' word reading abilities.

Interdependent processing and encoding of speech and concurrent background noise.

Speech processing can often take place in adverse listening conditions that involve the mixing of speech and background noise. In this study, we investigated processing dependencies between background noise and indexical speech features, using a speeded classification paradigm (Garner, 1974; Exp. 1), and whether background noise is encoded and represented in memory for spoken words in a continuous recognition memory paradigm (Exp.

Contextual variability during speech-in-speech recognition.

This study examined the influence of background language variation on speech recognition. English listeners performed an English sentence recognition task in either "pure" background conditions in which all trials had either English or Dutch background babble or in mixed background conditions in which the background language varied across trials (i.e.

Masking release due to linguistic and phonetic dissimilarity between the target and masker speech.

Purpose: To investigate masking release for speech maskers for linguistically and phonetically close (English and Dutch) and distant (English and Mandarin) language pairs.

Method: Thirty-two monolingual speakers of English with normal audiometric thresholds participated in the study. Data are reported for an English sentence recognition task in English and for Dutch and Mandarin competing speech maskers (Experiment 1) and noise maskers (Experiment 2) that were matched either to the long-term average speech spectra or to the temporal modulations of the speech maskers from Experiment 1.

Can hearing puter activate pupil? Phonological competition and the processing of reduced spoken words in spontaneous conversations.

In listeners' daily communicative exchanges, they most often hear casual speech, in which words are often produced with fewer segments, rather than the careful speech used in most psycholinguistic experiments. Three experiments examined phonological competition during the recognition of reduced forms such as [pjutər] for computer using a target-absent variant of the visual world paradigm. Listeners' eye movements were tracked upon hearing canonical and reduced forms as they looked at displays of four printed words.

Linguistic contributions to speech-on-speech masking for native and non-native listeners: language familiarity and semantic content.

This study examined whether speech-on-speech masking is sensitive to variation in the degree of similarity between the target and the masker speech. Three experiments investigated whether speech-in-speech recognition varies across different background speech languages (English vs Dutch) for both English and Dutch targets, as well as across variation in the semantic content of the background speech (meaningful vs semantically anomalous sentences), and across variation in listener status vis-à-vis the target and masker languages (native, non-native, or unfamiliar). The results showed that the more similar the target speech is to the masker speech (e.

THE INFLUENCE OF NOISE ON PHONOLOGICAL COMPETITION DURING SPOKEN WORD RECOGNITION.

Listeners' interactions often take place in auditorily challenging conditions. We examined how noise affects phonological competition during spoken word recognition. In a visual-world experiment, which allows us to examine the time-course of recognition, English participants listened to target words in quiet and in noise while they saw four pictures on the screen: a target (e.

Shadowing reduced speech and alignment.

This study examined whether listeners align to reduced speech. Participants were asked to shadow sentences from a casual speech corpus containing canonical and reduced targets. Participants' productions showed alignment: durations of canonical targets were longer than durations of reduced targets; and participants often imitated the segment types (canonical versus reduced) in both targets.