The intelligibility of periodically interrupted speech improves once the silent gaps are filled with noise bursts. This improvement has been attributed to phonemic restoration, a top-down repair mechanism that helps intelligibility of degraded speech in daily life. Two hypotheses were investigated using perceptual learning of interrupted speech. If different cognitive processes played a role in...

A sound turned off for a short moment can be perceived as continuous if the silent gap is filled with noise. The neural mechanisms underlying this "continuity illusion" were investigated using the mismatch negativity (MMN), an event-related potential reflecting the perception of a sudden change in an otherwise regular stimulus sequence. The MMN was recorded in four conditions using an oddball p...

BACKGROUND Bilingual (BL) listeners' difficulties in adverse noise conditions are exacerbated when perceiving their second language (L2) relative to their first language (L1). Perception of L2 is also significantly poorer by BL listeners compared to native monolingual (ML) listeners. PURPOSE The purpose of the study was to examine the effect of stationary and nonstationary energetic noise mas...

In phonemic restoration, intelligibility of interrupted speech is enhanced when noise fills the speech gaps. When the broadband envelope of missing speech amplitude modulates the intervening noise, intelligibility is even better. However, this phenomenon represents a perceptual failure: The amplitude modulation, a noise feature, is misattributed to the speech. Experiments explored whether objec...

BACKGROUND According to previous studies, most of the speech recognition disorders in older adults are theresults of deficits in audibility and auditory temporal resolution. In this paper, the effect of ageing on timecompressedspeech and auditory temporal resolution by word recognition in continuous and interrupted noisewas studied. METHODS A time-compressed speech test (TCST) was conducted o...

Constructive mechanisms in the auditory system may restore a fragmented sound when a gap in this sound is rendered inaudible by noise to yield a continuity illusion. Using combined psychoacoustic and electroencephalography experiments in humans, we found that the sensory-perceptual mechanisms that enable restoration suppress auditory cortical encoding of gaps in interrupted sounds. When physica...

n semi-active missile guidance, a high-power transmitter not collocated with the missile generates continuous wave or interrupted continuous wave illumination that is reflected from the target to the homing missile. Noise introduced into this illumination, which is reflected from rain, chaff, land, or sea clutter or is carried on spillover, can compete with the target return. The Navy has taske...