Speech listening study. The role that listener knowledge plays in the perception of imperf...

Speech listening study. The role that listener knowledge plays in the perception of imperfectly articulated speech was investigated in the American Journal of Speech—Language Pathology (Feb. 1995). Thirty female college students, randomly divided into three groups of 10, participated as listeners in the study. All subjects were required to listen to a 48-sentence audiotape of a Korean woman with cerebral palsy, and all were asked to transcribe her entire speech. For the first group of students (the control group), the speaker used her normal manner of speaking. For the second group (the treatment group), the speaker employed a learned breathing pattern (called breath-group strategy) to improve speech efficiency. The subjects in the third group (the familiarity group) also listened to the tape with the breath-group strategy, but only after they had practiced listening twice to another tape in which they were told exactly what the speaker was saying. At the end of the listening-transcribing session, two quantitative variables were measured for each listener: (1) the total number of words transcribed (called the rate of response) and (2) the percentage of words correctly transcribed (called the accuracy score).The data for all 30 subjects are provided in the accompanying table.

a. Use a graphical method to describe the differences in the distributions of response rates among the three groups.

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b. Use a graphical method to describe the distribution of accuracy scores for the three listener groups.

LISTEN

Source: Tjaden, K., and Liss, J. M. “The influence of familiarity on judgments of treated speech.” American Journal of Speech—Language Pathology, Vol. 4, No. 1. Feb. 1995, p. 43 (Table 1).