Jessica Chin

Research Student -  PhD

Thesis Title

The effects of language experience and task variation on speech-in-speech recognition.

Research Project

Every day, we face the task of understanding speech in the presence of auditory distractors in the environment, such as loud machines, music, or other people talking. When someone else is talking, their background speech may hinder our speech perception not just because of its loudness, but also due to its linguistic qualities. Our familiarity with the distracting speech affects our speech perception (e.g., whether it is in a language we understand or not), but the specific linguistic elements that contribute to this phenomenon are poorly understood. This thesis will examine the relationship between the listener’s language experience and the languages of the target and distractor speech. Specifically, the focus will be on the segmental differences between languages. The proposed experimental tasks range from sentence recognition (Experiment 1) to word recording (Experiment 2) to syllable identification (Experiment 3). All experiments will present target speech in the presence of competing multi-talker speech in the background. Findings may contribute to a deeper understanding of how certain features of a language can interfere with speech recognition, even when the distractor language is novel to the listener.

Qualifications

• 2017: Bachelor of Arts (Dean’s Scholars), Linguistics (Western Sydney University)
• 2019: Master of Research, Psycholinguistics (Western Sydney University)

Publications

Please visit my Google Scholar page.

Contact