Semantic Predictability Facilitates Comprehension of Degraded Speech in a Graded Manner.

ABSTRACT: Previous studies have shown that at moderate levels of spectral degradation, semantic predictability facilitates language comprehension. It is argued that when speech is degraded, listeners have narrowed expectations about the sentence endings; i.e., semantic prediction may be limited to only most highly predictable sentence completions. The main objectives of this study were to (i) examine whether listeners form narrowed expectations or whether they form predictions across a wide range of probable sentence endings, (ii) assess whether the facilitatory effect of semantic predictability is modulated by perceptual adaptation to degraded speech, and (iii) use and establish a sensitive metric for the measurement of language comprehension. For this, we created 360 German Subject-Verb-Obj

SUBMITTER: Bhandari P 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8459870 | biostudies-literature | 2021

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature