Speech communication becomes increasingly difficult with age, especially in adverse listening conditions. We compared speech adaptations made by ‘older adult’ (65-84 years) and ‘younger adult’ (19-26 years) talkers when speech is produced with communicative intent. The aim was to investigate how articulation rate is affected by the type of adverse listening condition and by the change in task d...

When listening to natural speech, listeners are fairly adept at using cues such as pitch, vocal tract length, prosody, and level differences to extract a target speech signal from an interfering speech masker. However, little is known about the cues that listeners might use to segregate synthetic speech signals that retain the intelligibility characteristics of speech but lack many of the featu...

In this paper I argue that a skills/strategies approach remains one of the many possible and effective approaches that can help L2 learners to improve their listening skills if classroom teachers implement it based on a good understanding of its cognitive as well as pedagogical underpinnings. Strategies are a series of events and might not be reportable in the listening process due to the heavy...

We examined the ability of 40 young children (aged five to eight) to understand speech (monosyllables, spondees, trochees, and trisyllables) when listening in a background of real-life classroom noise. All children had some difficulty understanding speech when the noise was at levels found in many classrooms (i.e., 65 dBA). However, at an intermediate (-6 dB SNR) level, kindergarten and grade 1...

Frequency shifted feedback (FSF) induces fluency when presented to speakers who stutter. This study examined whether FSF was more effective at removing disfluencies on easy or on difficult stretches of speech (where difficulty was defined with respect to utterance and word length). There were more disfluencies on the difficult stretches than on the easy stretches. There were significantly fewer...

Abstract The present study was carried out to investigate the effects of listening strategy instruction on students’ listening achievement and strategy use. The participants of the study were 50 English major freshman students of Dilla University. These Students were placed in experimental and control conditions for the purpose of comparing the mean difference between the two groups. The contro...

Music plays an important role in the daily life of cochlear implant (CI) users, but electrical hearing and speech processing pose challenges for enjoying music. Studies of unilateral CI (UCI) users' music perception have found that these subjects have little difficulty recognizing tempo and rhythm but great difficulty with pitch, interval and melody. The present study is an initial step towards...

We investigate the effect of linguistic complexity on cognitive load in a dual-task scenario, namely simultaneous driving and language use. To this end, we designed an experiment where participants use a driving simulator while listening to spoken stimuli and answering comprehension questions. Online physiological measures of cognitive load, including the recently established Index of Cognitive...

The Speech, Spatial and Qualities of Hearing Scale (SSQ) is designed to measure a range of hearing disabilities across several domains. Particular attention is given to hearing speech in a variety of competing contexts, and to the directional, distance and movement components of spatial hearing. In addition, the abilities both to segregate sounds and to attend to simultaneous speech streams are...

Background and Aim: Aging is associated with reduced cognitive abilities including attention and memory. There is some evidence that shows randomized dichotic digits test (RDDT) has enough difficulty to show the ear asymmetry in dichotic listening. This study aimed to compare the effect of free and focused attention on dichotic listening ability of young and elderly listeners. Methods: The cros...