Speaker: Erika Exton, Ph.D. Student in the Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences

Title: The effect of language experience on perceptual restoration and listening in noise

Abstract: Listeners often need to understand speech in the presence of background noise or other degraded conditions; doing so is particularly difficult for bilinguals and second language speakers. Perceptual restoration (PR) may be a helpful speech mechanism in noisy settings: this auditory illusion describes the phenomenon where the brain "fills in" missing information, causing listeners to perceive a speech signal interrupted with noise as if it were complete. Monolingual adults and children can use PR in understanding both sentences and individual words, and adults may also use it to identify individual words in a second language. The purpose of this project was to test how listeners' ability to use PR in understanding sentences is affected by bilingual status, as well as other individual differences between listeners such as the ability to understand sentences in noise and vocabulary knowledge. The results show that monolinguals and bilinguals use PR differently in understanding sentences, providing further evidence that the effect of bilingualism on listening in noise is driven by the use of top-down language-specific information.