Colloquium: Diane Kewley-Port

You are cordially invited to attend the following Colloquium presented by the SPHS Department and the SPHS PhD Organization.

Monday, February 9
4:00-5:00 p.m.
Speech and Hearing Building, Room C141

Diane Kewley-Port, Indiana University, Professor of Speech and Hearing Sciences and Cognitive Science, Vice President Elect of the Acoustical Society of America will present, "All about Vowels."

Abstract:
Results from numerous experiments on vowel perception will be presented. One series determined that vowels are more important than consonants for understanding fluent English. These studies investigated the perception of sentences where either all the vowels or all the consonants were replaced by noise. Both normal-hearing and hearing-impaired listeners recognized twice as many words in sentences with vowel only information. As expected, the hearing-impaired listeners with typical moderate hearing loss perform much worse than normal-hearing listeners. Other experiments have established that hearing-impaired listeners have processing deficits for vowels at peripheral levels of the auditory system that are predictive of their ability to identify vowels at more central levels. Similar experiments have also been conducted with second language learners (L2) of English (with normal hearing). While some language groups have extreme difficulty in identifying English vowels, they exhibit a normal ability to process vowels in the auditory periphery. These studies suggest that training protocols should help improve perception by L2 learners. Results from our current training protocol for vowels in single words show surprisingly good generalization to words in sentences.