Can audio-visual integration, adaptive learning, and explicit feedback improve the perception of noisy speech?
- Stephanie Deschamps, School of Communication Sciences and Disorders, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada
- Hanna Zhang, Linguistics, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
- Blair Armstrong, Psychology, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
AbstractThe perception of degraded speech input is essential in everyday life and is a major challenge in a variety of clinical settings, including for cochlear implant users. We investigated English speakers’ perception of noisy speech via an audio-visual lexical decision paradigm that modulated cross-modal integration, adaptive modulation of task difficulty, and explicit feedback on response accuracy. We then tested whether proficiency with this task transferred to the perception of noisy audio stimuli in a post test. Although we observed a processing advantage for bimodal stimuli during training, particularly in the adaptive training condition, we did not observe any benefit from these conditions in the post test, nor a benefit associated with providing explicit feedback. These results are discussed in relation to other studies of audio-visual integration and learning to perceive noisy speech, which may have observed different results due to more extensive training and different baseline proficiency levels.