Effects of speaking style and context on online word recognition in adverse listening conditions

This study investigated the time-course of word recognition in adverse listening conditions. Specifically, we examined the effect of different listener-oriented speaking styles and semantic context on lexical access in quiet and in noise. Young adult listeners participated in an online visual word recognition experiment. They heard sentences with a high- versus low-predictability semantic context, produced in Conversational (CO), Infant-Directed (IDS), and Clear (CS) speech while fixating two pictures on a screen: a target that matched the last word of the auditory stimulus and a distractor. All sentences were presented either in quiet, or mixed with speech-shaped noise at a −5 dB SNR. Results showed that IDS provided similar perceptual benefits to adult listeners as CS. Relative to low-predictability CO baseline, IDS and CS increased speed of word recognition for high-predictability sentences, in quiet and in noise equally. However, in the quiet condition, lexical access was eventually facilitated by con...