University of Groningen Perceptual Learning of Interrupted Speech

The intelligibility of periodically interrupted speech improves once the silent gaps are filled with noise bursts. This improvement has been attributed to phonemic restoration, a top-down repair mechanism that helps intelligibility of degraded speech in daily life. Two hypotheses were investigated using perceptual learning of interrupted speech. If different cognitive processes played a role in restoring interrupted speech with and without filler noise, the two forms of speech would be learned at different rates and with different perceived mental effort. If the restoration benefit were an artificial outcome of using the ecologically invalid stimulus of speech with silent gaps, this benefit would diminish with training. Two groups of normal-hearing listeners were trained, one with interrupted sentences with the filler noise, and the other without. Feedback was provided with the auditory playback of the unprocessed and processed sentences, as well as the visual display of the sentence text. Training increased the overall performance significantly, however restoration benefit did not diminish. The increase in intelligibility and the decrease in perceived mental effort were relatively similar between the groups, implying similar cognitive mechanisms for the restoration of the two types of interruptions. Training effects were generalizable, as both groups improved their performance also with the other form of speech than that they were trained with, and retainable. Due to null results and relatively small number of participants (10 per group), further research is needed to more confidently draw conclusions. Nevertheless, training with interrupted speech seems to be effective, stimulating participants to more actively and efficiently use the top-down restoration. This finding further implies the potential of this training approach as a rehabilitative tool for hearing-impaired/elderly populations. Citation: Benard MR, Başkent D (2013) Perceptual Learning of Interrupted Speech. PLoS ONE 8(3): e58149. doi:10.1371/journal.pone. 0058149 Editor: Joel Snyder, UNLV, United States of America Received October 17, 2012; Accepted January 31, 2013; Published March 1, 2013 Copyright: 2013 Benard, Başkent. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Funding: Funding sources: 1) VIDI grant 016.096. 397 from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) and the Netherlands Organization for Health Research and Development (ZonMw). URL: http://www.nwo. nl/; http://www.zonmw. nl/. 2) Rosalind Franklin Fellowship from University Medical Center Groningen. URL: http://www.rug. nl/ggw/vacatures/RosalindFranklin/index. 3) Pento Audiology Center Zwolle. 4) Heinsius Houbolt Foundation. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. * E-mail: d.baskent@umcg.nl