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Abstract

The purpose of the present study was to examine the role of grammatical and semantical constraints in linguistic strings functioning as maskers. 12 college age, normal hearing, native speakers of English, served as subjects. Three conditions of 25 words with grammatical strings as competing speech, 25 words with semantically anomalous strings as competing speech, and 25 words with ungrammatical strings as maskers were assessed in a treatment-by-subjects analysis of variance. A critical difference test indicated that the difference lay between the mean articulation scores for the semantically anomalous strings and the grammatical and ungrammatical strings. Thus, subjects' performance when the semantically anomalous strings functioned as the masker was depressed relative to performance under the other two conditions of competing speech. These results appeared to be centered around the concepts of attention (familiarity of masker), probability and information content of the masker, and constituent analysis.

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Intelligibility of Monosyllabic Words Masked by Linguistic Strings

Abstract

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