Speech Acoustics and Perception Lab

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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

    Perceived Emotion in Clear Speech

     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.

    Feasibility Testing of a Noninvasive Ventilator Microphone

    Patients receiving support from a mechanical ventilator have traditionally required invasive ventilation, with a tube inserted directly into the airway through the mouth.  An alternative is non-invasive ventilation (NIV), which replaces the invasive tube with a face mask. While the use of NIV is expanding in many settings, a drawback as it severely hinders patients’ ability to communicate effectively. A collaboration between the SAP lab, Axon Medical, and the University of Utah Anesthesiology department recently tested a microphone system that enhances communication in patients undergoing NIV. The results of these tests with young healthy volunteers as well as with patients in the ICU were published in the International Journal of Speech-Language-Pathology and showed that intelligibility and comprehensibility increasing significantly while using the NIV microphone devices.

    Lab Members

    Director

    Graduate Assistants

    Liz Young, M.S., CCC-SLP

    Audiology Capstone Students

    Cameron Bolinder

    Whitney Robison

    Carly Alston

    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.

      • Ferguson, S.H. (2024, May). Vowels in clear and conversational speech: Intelligibility for listeners with hearing loss. 186th
        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. 

    Contact Us

    speechperception@utah.edu 

    Phone: 801-585-0036

    Speech Acoustics and Perception Laboratory

    390 South 1530 East, Room 1218
    Salt Lake City, UT 84112

    Directions

    Behavior Health Science Building