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Listeners are sensitive to the speech breathing time series: Evidence from a gap detection task

MacIntyre, Alexis Deighton; Scott, Sophie K; (2022) Listeners are sensitive to the speech breathing time series: Evidence from a gap detection task. Cognition , 225 , Article 105171. 10.1016/j.cognition.2022.105171. Green open access

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Abstract

The effect of non-speech sounds, such as breathing noise, on the perception of speech timing is currently unclear. In this paper we report the results of three studies investigating participants' ability to detect a silent gap located adjacent to breath sounds during naturalistic speech. Experiment 1 (n = 24, in-person) asked whether participants could either detect or locate a silent gap that was added adjacent to breath sounds during speech. In Experiment 2 (n = 182; online), we investigated whether different placements within an utterance were more likely to elicit successful detection of gaps. In Experiment 3 (n = 102; online), we manipulated the breath sounds themselves to examine the effect of breath-specific characteristics on gap identification. Across the study, we document consistent effects of gap duration, as well as gap placement. Moreover, in Experiment 2, whether a gap was positioned before or after an interjected breath significantly predicted accuracy as well as the duration threshold at which gaps were detected, suggesting that nonverbal aspects of audible speech production specifically shape listeners' temporal expectations. We also describe the influences of the breath sounds themselves, as well as the surrounding speech context, that can disrupt objective gap detection performance. We conclude by contextualising our findings within the literature, arguing that the verbal acoustic signal is not "speech itself" per se, but rather one part of an integrated percept that includes speech-related respiration, which could be more fully explored in speech perception studies.

Type: Article
Title: Listeners are sensitive to the speech breathing time series: Evidence from a gap detection task
Location: Netherlands
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2022.105171
Publisher version: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2022.105171
Language: English
Additional information: © 2022 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)
Keywords: Breathing, Entrainment, Gap detection, Rhythm, Speech, Acoustic Stimulation, Humans, Noise, Respiration, Speech, Speech Perception, Time Factors
UCL classification: UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > Div of Psychology and Lang Sciences > Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences
UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > Div of Psychology and Lang Sciences
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10152020
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