Priming of lowpass-filtered speech affects response bias, not sensitivity, in a bandwidth discrimination task.
Priming is demonstrated when prior information about the content of a distorted, filtered, or masked auditory message improves its clarity. The current experiment attempted to quantify aspects of priming by determining its effects on performance and bias in a lowpass-filter-cutoff frequency discrimination task. Nonsense sentences recorded by a female talker were sharply lowpass filtered at a nominal cutoff frequency (F) of 0.5 or 0.75 kHz or at a higher cutoff frequency (F + ΔF). The listeners' task was to determine which interval of a two-interval-forced-choice trial contained the nonsense sentence filtered with F + ΔF. On priming trials, the interval 1 sentence was displayed on a computer screen prior to the auditory portion of the trial. The prime markedly affected bias, increasing the number of correct and incorrect interval 1 responses but did not affect overall discrimination performance substantially. These findings were supported through a second experiment that required listeners to make confidence judgments. The paradigm has the potential to help quantify the limits of speech perception when uncertainty about the auditory message is removed.
Department of Communication Disorders, University of Massachusetts, 358 North Pleasant Street, Amherst, Massachusetts 01003, USA. rlf@comdis.umass.edu
Richard L
RL
Freyman
Amanda M
AM
Griffin
Neil A
NA
Macmillan
D000161:Acoustic Stimulation; D000328:Adult; D001302:Audiometry, Speech; D001309:Auditory Threshold; D004192:Discrimination, Psychological; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007600:Judgment; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D011571:Psychoacoustics; D013067:Speech Perception; D013647:Task Performance and Analysis; D055815:Young Adult