Phonemic restoration effect

Phonemic restoration effect is a perceptual phenomenon where under certain conditions, sounds actually missing from a speech signal can be restored by the brain and may appear to be heard. The effect occurs when missing phonemes in an auditory signal are replaced with a masking noise, resulting in the brain filling in absent phonemes. The effect can be so strong that some listeners may not even notice that there are phonemes missing. This effect is commonly observed in a conversation with heavy background noise, making it difficult to properly hear every phoneme being spoken. Different factors can change the strength of the effect, including age and gender.[1][2]

This effect is more important to humans than what was initially thought. Linguists have pointed out that at least the English language has many false starts and extraneous sounds. The phonemic restoration effect is the brain's way of resolving those imperfections in our speech. Without this effect interfering with our language processing, there would be a greater need for much more accurate speech signals and human speech could require much more precision. For experiments, white noise is necessary because it takes the place of these imperfections in speech. One of the most important factors in language is continuity and in turn intelligibility.

Phonemic Restoration Effect

Background

The phonemic restoration effect was first documented in a 1970 paper by Richard M. Warren entitled "Perceptual Restoration of Missing Speech Sounds". The purpose of the experiment was to give a reason to why in background of extraneous sounds, masked individual phonemes were still comprehensible.

“The state governors met with their respective legislatures convening in the capital city.”

In his initial experiments, Warren provided the sentence shown and first replaced the first 's' phoneme in legislatures with extraneous noise, in the form of a cough. In a small group of 20 subjects, 19 did not notice a missing phoneme and one person misidentified the missing phoneme. This indicated that in the absence of a phoneme, the brain filled in the missing phoneme. This indicated that through top-down processing. This was a phenomenon that was somewhat known at the time, but no one was able to pinpoint why it was occurring or had labeled it. He again did the same experiment with the sentence:

'“It was found that the wheel was on the axle.”'

He replaced the 'wh' sound in wheel and the same results were found. All people tested wrote down wheel. Warren later did much research for next several decades on the subject.[3]

Since Warren, much research has been done to test the various aspects of the effect. These aspects include how many phonemes can be removed, what noise is played in replacement of the phoneme, and how different contexts alter the effect.

Neuroanatomy

Auditory cortex

Neurologically the signs of interrupted or stopped speech can be suppressed in the thalamus and auditory cortex. It is currently thought to be done during top-down processing of the auditory system.[4] Most speech is thought to be done through bottom-up processing which relies on using the data provided to process information. The typical route for a speech signal from the ear is to the auditory complex, where it is then processed through Wernicke's area to determine what is being said. Much is unknown about where in this process the brain is filling in the missing phoneme, but it is understood to be at the top of the language processing system. Phonemic restoration is one of several phenomenons proving that existing knowledge in the brain is able to fill in information that is not there, similar to an optical illusion. It is believed that humans evolved to be able to fill in phonemes that were absent in order to be able to communicate with other humans in noisy situations. It is not fully known at what point in the top-bottom processing the phonemic restoration effect occurs.[5]

Disabilities

Hearing impairment

People with mild and moderate hearing loss were tested for the effectiveness of phonemic restoration. Those with mild hearing loss performed at the same level of a normal listener. Those with moderate hearing loss had almost no perception and failed to identify the missing phonemes. This research is also dependent on the amount of words the observer is comfortable understanding because of the nature of top-down processing.[6]

Cochlear implants

Cochlear Implant

For people with cochlear implants, phonemic restoration is only achievable at resolutions higher than 8. Implants that are at 4 or 8 channels do not have the specificity to develop distinct gaps between phonemes, enough to a point that white noise would help fill in the missing phoneme. When the brain is using top-down processing, it uses as much information as it can to make a decision and with lower resolution implants, there is less information to make a correct guess. The study for this came upon when listeners with cochlear implants were not able to adequately understand speech and upon further investigation, one of the main reasons is because of a breakdown in the phonemic restoration effect.[5]

Factors

Gender

Instead of completely replacing the phonemes, researchers masked them with tones that are informative(helped the listeners pick the correct phoneme), uninformative(neither helped or hurt the listener select the correct phoneme), or misinformative (hurt the listener in picking the correct phoneme). The results showed that women were much more affected by informative and misinformative cues than men. This evidence suggests that women are influenced by top-down semantic information more than men.[7]

Age

A large area of study consists of seeing if children are affected by phonemic restoration and if so, at what capacity. Children are able to produce results comparable to adults by about the age of 5, however still not doing as well as adults. At such an early age most information is processed through bottom-up processing due to the lack of information to recall from. However,this does mean they are able to use previous knowledge of words to fill in the missing phonemes with much less of their brain developed than adults. In children, there was no difference in gender found in the results.[8][9]

Setting

The effect reverses in a reverberation room, which echoes real life more so than the typical quiet rooms used for experimentation. This allows for echoes of the spoken phonemes to act as the replacement noise for the missing phonemes. The additional produced white noise that replaces the phoneme adds its own echo and causes listeners to not perform as well.[10]

Rate

Another study by Warren was done to determine the effect of the duration of the replacement phoneme on comprehension. Because the brain processes information optimally at a certain rate, when the gap became approximately the length of the word is when the effect started top breakdown and become ineffective. At this point the effect is no longer effective because the observer is now cognisant of the gap.[11]

Multisensory

Much like the McGurk Effect, when listeners were also able to see the words being spoken, they were much more likely to correctly identify the missing phonemes. Like every sense, the brain will use every piece of information it deems important to make a judgement about what it is perceiving. Using the visual cues of mouth movements, the brain will you both in top-down processing to make a decision about what phoneme is supposed to be heard. Vision is the primary sense for humans and for the most part assists in speech perception the most.[3]

Context

Because languages are distinctly structured, the brain has some sense of what word is to come next in a proper sentence. When listeners were listening to sentences with proper structure with missing phonemes, they performed much better than with a nonsensical sentence without a proper structure. This comes from the predictive nature of the pre-frontal cortex in determining what word should be coming next in order for the sentence to make sense. Top-down processing relies on the surrounding information in a sentence to fill in the missing information. If the sentence does not make sense to the observer then there will be little at the top of the process for the observer to go off of. If a puzzle piece of a familiar picture was missing, it would be very simple for the brain to know what that puzzle piece would look like. If the picture of something that makes no sense to the human brain and has never been seen before, the brain will have much more difficulty understanding what is missing.[12][13]

Intensity

Only when the intensity of the noise replacing the phonemes is the same or louder as the surrounding words, does the effect properly work. This effect is made apparent when listeners hear a sentence with gaps replaced by white noise repeat over and over with the white noise volume increasing with each iteration. The sentence becomes more and more clear to the listener as the white noise is louder.[1][14]

Dichotic listening

When a word with the segment 's' is removed and replaced by silence and a comparable noise segment were presented dichotically. Simply put, one ear was hearing the full sentence without phoneme excision and the other ear was hearing a sentence with a 's' sound removed. This version of the phonemic restoration effect was particularly strong because the brain was doing much less guess work with the sentence, because the information was given to the observer. Observers reported hearing exactly the same sentence in both ears, regardless of one of their ears missing a phoneme.[15]

Language

No research was found on how different languages differ from English in regards to the effect, however it is assumed that this effect is universal for all languages.

See also

References

  1. 1 2 Kashino, Makio (2006). "Phonemic restoration: The brain creates missing speech sounds". Acoustical Science and Technology. 27 (6): 318–21. doi:10.1250/ast.27.318.
  2. ↑ Samuel, Arthur G (1987). "Lexical uniqueness effects on phonemic restoration". Journal of Memory and Language. 26 (1): 36–56. doi:10.1016/0749-596X(87)90061-1.
  3. 1 2 Warren, Richard M. (1970). "Perceptual Restoration of Missing Speech Sounds". Science. 167 (3917): 392–3. Bibcode:1970Sci...167..392W. doi:10.1126/science.167.3917.392. PMID 5409744.
  4. ↑ Riecke, L.; Vanbussel, M.; Hausfeld, L.; Baskent, D.; Formisano, E.; Esposito, F. (2012). "Hearing an Illusory Vowel in Noise: Suppression of Auditory Cortical Activity". Journal of Neuroscience. 32 (23): 8024–34. doi:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0440-12.2012. PMID 22674277.
  5. 1 2 Başkent, Deniz (2012). "Effect of Speech Degradation on Top-Down Repair: Phonemic Restoration with Simulations of Cochlear Implants and Combined Electric–Acoustic Stimulation". Journal of the Association for Research in Otolaryngology. 13 (5): 683–92. doi:10.1007/s10162-012-0334-3. PMC 3441953Freely accessible. PMID 22569838.
  6. ↑ Başkent, Deniz; Eiler, Cheryl L.; Edwards, Brent (2010). "Phonemic restoration by hearing-impaired listeners with mild to moderate sensorineural hearing loss". Hearing Research. 260 (1–2): 54–62. doi:10.1016/j.heares.2009.11.007. PMID 19922784.
  7. ↑ Liederman, Jacqueline; Gilbert, Kristen; Fisher, Janet McGraw; Mathews, Geetha; Frye, Richard E.; Joshi, Pallavi (2011). "Are Women More Influenced than Men by Top-down Semantic Information when Listening to Disrupted Speech?". Language and Speech. 54 (1): 33–48. doi:10.1177/0023830910388000. PMID 21524011.
  8. ↑ Newman, Rochelle S. (2004). "Perceptual restoration in children versus adults". Applied Psycholinguistics. 25 (4): 481–93. doi:10.1017/S0142716404001237.
  9. ↑ Pattison, Darcy Sue (1976). Phonemic restoration in nursery school children (Thesis). Kansas State University. OCLC 33842958. hdl:2097/11418.
  10. ↑ Srinivasan, Nirmal Kumar; Zahorik, Pavel (2012). "Phonemic restoration effect reversed in a reverberant room". The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. 131 (1): EL28–34. Bibcode:2012ASAJ..131L..28S. doi:10.1121/1.3665120. PMC 3261052Freely accessible. PMID 22280726.
  11. ↑ Bashford, James A.; Meyers, MD; Brubaker, BS; Warren, RM (1988). "Illusory continuity of interrupted speech: Speech rate determines durational limits". The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. 84 (5): 1635–8. Bibcode:1988ASAJ...84.1635B. doi:10.1121/1.397178. PMID 3209768.
  12. ↑ Groppe, David M.; Choi, Marvin; Huang, Tiffany; Schilz, Joseph; Topkins, Ben; Urbach, Thomas P.; Kutas, Marta (2010). "The phonemic restoration effect reveals pre-N400 effect of supportive sentence context in speech perception". Brain Research. 1361: 54–66. doi:10.1016/j.brainres.2010.09.003. PMC 2963680Freely accessible. PMID 20831863.
  13. ↑ Sivonen, Päivi; Maess, Burkhard; Lattner, Sonja; Friederici, Angela D. (2006). "Phonemic restoration in a sentence context: Evidence from early and late ERP effects". Brain Research. 1121 (1): 177–89. doi:10.1016/j.brainres.2006.08.123. PMID 17027933.
  14. ↑ Shinn-Cunningham, Barbara G.; Wang, Dali (2008). "Influences of auditory object formation on phonemic restoration". The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. 123 (1): 295–301. Bibcode:2008ASAJ..123..295S. doi:10.1121/1.2804701. PMID 18177159.
  15. ↑ Eimas, Peter D.; Tajchman, G; Nygaard, LC; Marcus, DJ (1996). "Phonemic restoration and integration during dichotic listening". The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. 99 (2): 1141–7. Bibcode:1996ASAJ...99.1141E. doi:10.1121/1.414598. PMID 8609298.

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