The effects of emotional prosody on perceived clarity in degraded speech

Sammanfattning: The ability to hear is important to communicate with other people. People suffering from hearing loss are more likely to also suffer from loneliness and depression (Mener et al., 2013; Mo et al., 2005). To understand how degraded speech is recognized, the pop-out effect has been studied. The pop-out effect is the moment when a listener recognizes the meaning of degraded speech. Previous research on the pop-out effect in perception of speech has predominantly been focused towards top-down processes, such as form-based priming and semantic coherence in sentences. The purpose of this study was to research the relationship between emotional prosody and the perception of speech in varying levels of degraded speech. The participants were presented sentences with angry, neutral or happy prosody in varying levels of noise vocoding. The participants were then asked to rate the perceived amount of noise for each sentence, and if the prosody was perceived as positive, neutral or negative for each sentence. The results suggest that the participants' ability to perceive positive prosody in the sentences decreased more rapidly than negative as the amount of noise increased. The result did not show any statistically significant evidence that emotional prosody had any effect on the perceived amount of noise. Future research should further investigate emotional prosody together with emotional semantics, as an emotionally coherent spoken sentence, and the influences on speech perception in adverse listening conditions, in order to further investigate the factors contributing to the pop-out effect.