Temporal integration of interrupted speech: Effects of time compression and expansion on the intelligibility of words and sentences.

Temporal integration of interrupted speech was investigated by contrasting the performance on gated to time‐compressed/expanded words and sentences. In the control condition, HINT sentences and CNC words were gated at 0.5, 1, 2, 4, 8, or 16 Hz using a 50% duty cycle. In the two experimental conditions, stimuli previously gated at each rate were either time‐compressed by concatenating the consecutive speech segments or time‐expanded by doubling the silent intervals between consecutive speech segments. Across rates, these manipulations thus varied both the size of intact speech intervals and the duration of silence between the intervals. No differences were observed in the rate‐intelligibility functions of gated versus time‐expanded words and sentences with the overlapping functions monotonically rising with rate. Though intelligibility was similar to the gated control condition at the lower and higher rates, the time‐compressed rate‐intelligibility function for sentences was nonmonotonic with a minimum at ...