Speech Intelligibility Assessment: Predicting “Noncompliant” Listener Behavior

Purpose: When researching speech intelligibility among people with dysarthria, convenience sampling has typically been used to recruit listeners. A new online crowdsourcing method, Mechanical Turk (MTurk), results in ecologically valid results, but outlier results are often removed from the analysis and considered noncompliant . This study aims to examine whether there is a relationship between age, gender, speech/language/hearing impairment, and whether someone is noncompliant . Methods: 16 speakers, both with and without dysarthria, were recorded while they read prewritten sentences. Research participants found through MTurk then listened to the sentences and transcribed them. They also were asked questions including their age, gender, and if they have a speech/language/hearing impairment. Results: There was no correlation found between either age or gender and if the participant was noncompliant . However, there was a relationship that suggests participants with communication disorders were more likely to be noncompliant . Conclusion: The results of this study suggest that people with communication disorders are more likely to be removed from studies involving people with dysarthria. This could affect the ecological validity of the results since many people with dysarthria often interact with people with communication disorders in their daily lives

Expecting the unexpected: Code-switching as a facilitatory cue in online sentence processing

Despite its prominent use among bilinguals, psycholinguistic studies reported code-switch processing costs (e.g., Meuter & Allport, 1999). This paradox may partly be due to the focus on the code-switch itself instead of its potential subsequent benefits. Motivated by corpus studies on CS patterns and sociopragmatic functions of CS, we asked whether bilinguals use code-switches as a cue to the lexical characteristics of upcoming speech. We report a visual world study testing whether code-switching facilitates the anticipation of lower-frequency words. Results confirm that US Spanish–English bilinguals (n = 30) use minority (Spanish) to majority (English) language code-switches in real-time language processing as a cue that a less frequent word would ensue, as indexed by increased looks at images representing lower- vs. higher-frequency words in the code-switched condition, prior to the target word onset. These results highlight the need to further integrate sociolinguistic and corpus observations into the experimental study of code-switching