Speech Acoustics and Perception Lab
The Speech Acoustics & Perception Lab studies the different factors that affect how people understand speech, including the characteristics of the speaker, the listener, and the environment.
About the Lab
The Speech Acoustics & Perception Laboratory examines talker, listener, and environmental factors associated with successful speech understanding as well as communication breakdowns. Projects range from perceptual experiments where listeners identify or rate what they've heard, to acoustic analyses of previously-recorded speech materials, to speech production studies where participants' speech is recorded across various tasks and test conditions. Our results provide important information to audiologists, speech-language pathologists, and other speech and hearing professionals about how listener hearing status, talker characteristics and behaviors, and environmental conditions all play a part in how we understand speech.
Our Methods
For most studies, listeners are tested in a 7'x7' sound-treated room in front of a computer monitor, keyboard, and mouse. The booth has a large window overlooking the Salt Lake Valley. Other studies are carried out in a larger IAC audiometric test booth located elsewhere on the 12th floor.
Historically in our lab, test sounds are presented at conversational listening levels via insert earphones using a Tucker-Davis Technologies Psychoacoustics and Speech workstation and computer located outside the test room. Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, we have also begun to utilize a simplified audio interface and implement online testing for listening studies. In a typical perception study, listeners usually respond to stimuli by clicking on categories shown on the monitor, such as by choosing the vowel they heard or rating how clearly a sentence had been spoken.
Speech production studies may involve reading works, sentences, or passages aloud from a computer screen or printed list or more spontaneous tasks like describing pictures. Speech is recorded using a headset microphone, other equipment may also be used to record respiration or voicing.
Current Studies
Many communication partners of people with hearing loss say that when they speak clearly, their partner thinks they're mad at them. A series of studies from the SAP lab have confirmed that, on average, clear speech is indeed rated as sounding angry more often than conversational speech. But what is causing this increase in perceived anger? This question is being investigated from several angles by various lab members, including acoustic analyses and perceptual studies that modify acoustic elements of clear speech to examine changes in perceived emotion.
Voice-specialized speech-language pathologists (SLPs) often use an assessment technique known as stimulability testing to determine if patients are candidates for voice therapy. However, very little is known about how SLPs use this assessment to make treatment decisions. Liz Young’s dissertation project uses a variety of methods, including in-depth interviews, mock stimulability testing, and acoustic analyses, to explore how and why SLPs use stimulability to inform their assessment and treatment decisions for patients with voice disorders.
Lab Members
Director
Graduate Assistants
Audiology Capstone Students
Available Speech Materials
The Ferguson Clear Speech Database
The Ferguson Clear Speech Database was developed at Indiana University in 2002. It consists of high-quality recordings of 41 talkers reading 188 sentences aloud twice: under instructions to speak as though they were having a normal conversation (conversational speech) and under instructions to speak as though they were talking to a person with hearing loss (clear speech).
Of the 188 sentences, 174 were created by inserting keywords into neutral sentence frames. Keywords were either vowels in /bVd/ context (7 tokens per vowel, each in a different frame) or monosyllabic words from the NU-6 (a separate list in each style, two tokens per word, each in a different frame). The remaining sentences, 14 per speaking style, were selected from the CID Everyday Sentence test.
Use of the Ferguson database is FREE for noncommercial use. Contact Dr. Sarah Hargus Ferguson for information about how to access materials.
**All presentations and publications of research carried out using materials from the Ferguson Database must include the following acknowledgment: Development of the Ferguson Clear Speech Database was support by NIH grant DC02229 to Diane Kewley-Port.
The Utah Speaking Style Corpus
The Utah Speaking Style Corpus consists of recordings of conversational and clear speech from several speech production studies carried out in the past 10 years. Contact Dr. Sarah Hargus Ferguson for more information.
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- Silcox, J.W., Bennett, K., Copeland, A., Ferguson, S.H. & Payne, B.R. (2024) The costs (and benefits?) of effotful listening for older adults: Insights from simultaneous electrophysiology, pupillometry and memory, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 36, 997-1020. PDF
- Ferguson, S.H., Hunter, E.J., & Morgan, S.D. (2024) Within-talker and with-in session stability of acoustic characteristics of conversational and clear speaking styles. Journal of Acoustical Society of America, 155, 44-55.
- Young, E.D., Ferguson, S.H., Brewer, L.M., Schiedermayer, B.F., Brown, S.M., Leither, L.M. (2023). Using a novel in-mask non-invasive ventilator microphone to improve talker intelligibility in healthy and hospitalized adults. International Journal of Speech-Language Pathology.
- Ferguson, S.H., Wageck, M., & Young, E.D. (2023) Acoustic properties of anger in clear and conversational speech. Perspectives of the ASHA Special Interest Groups, 8, 448-454
- Morgan, S.D., Ferguson, S.H., Jennings, S.G., & Crain, A.D. (2022). Perceived anger in clear and conversational speech: Contributions of age and hearing loss. Brain Sciences, 12(2), 210.
- Crandall, H.A., Silcox, J.W., Ferguson, S.H., Lohani, M., & Payne, B .R. (2022). The effects of captioning errors, background noise, and hearing loss on memory for text-captioned speech. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 65(6), 2364-2390. PDF
- Stehr, D.A., Hickok, G. Ferguson, S.H., & Grossman, E.D. (2021). Examining vocal attractiveness through measures of articulatory working space. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, PDF
- Payne, B.R., Silcox, J., Lash, A., Ferguson, S.H., & Lohani, M. (2021) Test captioning buffers against the effects of background noise and hearing loss on memory for speech. Ear and Hearing PDF
- Schilaty, S., Ferguson, S.H., Morgan, S.D., & Champougny, C. (2021). Intelligibility of British English for American younger and older adults with and without hearing loss. Journal of American Academy of Audiology, PDF
- Behrman, A., Ferguson, S.H., & Flom, P. (2020). The effects of clear speech on American English listener perception of Spanish-accented and native English speech. Perspectives of the ASHA Special Interest Groups, PDF
- Johnson, E., Morgan, S., & Ferguson, S.H. (2020). Does time compression decrease intelligibility for female talkers more than for male talkers? Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 63, 1083-1092. PDF
- Sarah Hargus Ferguson on Google Scholar
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- Ferguson, S.H. (2024, May). Vowels in clear and conversational speech: Intelligibility for listeners with hearing loss.
Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. - Ellerston, J., Ferguson, S.H., Young, E., & Hunter, E.J. (2022, June). Vocal dosage for partners of people with hearing impairment. The Voice Foundation’s 51st Annual Symposium: Care of the Professional Voice, Philadelphia, PA.
- Hunter, E.J., Ferguson, S.H., & Morgan, S.D. (2022, June). Within-session stability of vocal characteristics during repeated measures and different production styles. The Voice Foundation’s 51st Annual Symposium: Care of the Professional Voice, Philadelphia, PA.
- Young, E.D., Ferguson, S.H., Brewer, L.M., Schiedermayer, B., & Reddy, C. (2021, November). Non-invasive ventilation microphone improves patient intelligibility in healthy young adults. American Speech-Language-Hearing Association Convention, Washington, DC.
- Wageck, M., Ferguson, S.H., & Young, E.D. (2021, October). What makes clear speech angry? Academy of Rehabilitative Audiology Institute, Raleigh, NC.
- Ferguson, S.H. (2024, May). Vowels in clear and conversational speech: Intelligibility for listeners with hearing loss.
Contact Us
Phone: 801-585-0036
Speech Acoustics and Perception Laboratory
390 South 1530 East, Room 1218
Salt Lake City, UT 84112
