Linguistic Context Effects in the Speech Perfection of Malay-speaking Normal Hearing Young Adults

The study examined the use oflinguistic cuntextual cues among native, Malay speaking normal hearing young adults. Ten undergraduate students of Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia participated in the study. All subjects had normal hearing with the average hearing threshold levels for the overall left and the right ears of7. 8 dB (SD 4.1). The Malay Hearing in Noise Test (MyHINT) materials were employed and presented to the subjects at an approximately 65 dBA presentation level. Testing was conducted in a soundfield in three different listening conditions: in quiet, in noise with +5 dB signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and 0 dB SNR. In every test condition, three lists ofMyHINTwere administered to each subject. The magnitude of context effects was measured using the j factor, which was derived from measurements of recognition probabilities for whole sentences (P ) and the constituent words in the sentences (P ) in which w p j = log P / log P . Results showed that all subjects scored 100% identification w p of words in sentences and whole sentences in quiet listening condition, while subjects peiformances in 0 dB SNR were significantly poorer than that in quiet and in +5 dB SNR (p 0.001). The j-values were significantly correlated with the probability ofrecognizing words in the sentences (r =0.515, p =0.029) in which lower j values were associated with lower Pl Subjects were not significantly different from each other in their use ofcontextual cues in adverse listening conditions [F(9,7) = 1.34, p = 0.359]. Using the linear regression function for j on word recognition probabilities, the predicted Pw were calculated. It was found that the predicted and measured probabilities of recognizing whole sentences were highly correlated: r = 0.973, p 0.001. The results suggested that linguistic contextual information become increasingly importantfor recognition ofsentences by normal hearing young adult listeners as SNR deteriorates.