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Vibrotactile enhancement of speech-in-noise perception at the cocktail party

par Rautu, Ioana-Sabina ;De Tiege, Xavier ;Bourguignon, Mathieu ;Bertels, Julie
Référence Belgian Association for Psychological Sciences (BAPS) Annual meeting (29-30 May 2024: VUB, Bruxelles, Belgium)
Publication Non publié, 2024-05-30

Communication à un colloque

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Résumé :

Understanding speech in the presence of multiple speakers (i.e., cocktail-party scene) is challenging. In such scenarios, research has shown that visual speech cues can improve speech intelligibility, but the extent to which tactile speech input can also provide a beneficial effect remains unclear. In the current study, we present two distinct experiments which evaluated the effect of vibrotactile stimulation on speech perception in cocktail-party noise. Firstly, we measured 46 participants’ speech recognition thresholds in audio-only and audio-tactile noisy conditions. The vibrotactile stimulation, presented congruently (i.e., synchronously) with the speech stream of interest, was provided to the palms either unimanually or bimanually. Secondly, 30 participants listened to four 6-min audio stories which contained speech presented in silence or embedded in noise, with and without additional unimanual vibrotactile stimulation. The vibrotactile input was either congruent or incongruent (i.e., random) with the attended speech. At the end of each story, participants answered comprehension questions related to each experimental condition. The first experiment showed a significant positive effect of vibrotactile stimulation on speech-in-noise recognition, with no significant effect of the stimulation location. The second experiment illustrated a significant effect of congruent vibrotactile stimulation on the percentage of correct responses to comprehension questions. Moreover, it highlighted the absence of a significant enhancing effect when the vibrotactile input is incongruent with the speech signal, as well as in the absence of background noise. Taken together, our results illustrate the potential role of the tactile modality to supplement speech-in-noise perception, even in complex cocktail-party auditory scenes.