Intelligibility of speech produced by sighted and blind adults
Bibliographic record
Abstract
PURPOSE: It is well known that speech uses both the auditory and visual modalities to convey information. In cases of congenital sensory deprivation, the feedback language learners have access to for mapping visible and invisible orofacial articulation is impoverished. Although the effects of blindness on the movements of the lips, jaw, and tongue have been documented in francophone adults, not much is known about their consequences for speech intelligibility. The objective of this study is to investigate the effects of congenital visual deprivation on vowel intelligibility in adult speakers of Canadian French. METHOD: Twenty adult listeners performed two perceptual identification tasks in which vowels produced by congenitally blind adults and sighted adults were used as stimuli. The vowels were presented in the auditory, visual, and audiovisual modalities (experiment 1) and at different signal-to-noise ratios in the audiovisual modality (experiment 2). Correct identification scores were calculated. Sequential information analyses were also conducted to assess the amount of information transmitted to the listeners along the three vowel features of height, place of articulation, and rounding. RESULTS: The results showed that, although blind speakers did not differ from their sighted peers in the auditory modality, they had lower scores in the audiovisual and visual modalities. Some vowels produced by blind speakers are also less robust in noise than those produced by sighted speakers. CONCLUSION: Together, the results suggest that adult blind speakers have learned to adapt to their sensory loss so that they can successfully achieve intelligible vowel targets in non-noisy conditions but that they produce less intelligible speech in noisy conditions. Thus, the trade-off between visible (lips) and invisible (tongue) articulatory cues observed between vowels produced by blind and sighted speakers is not equivalent in terms of perceptual efficiency.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".