Effects of word familiarity and receptive vocabulary size on speech-in-noise recognition among young adults with normal hearing

Meredith D. Braza; Heather L. Porter; Emily Buss; Lauren Calandruccio; Ryan W. McCreery; Lori J. Leibold

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0264581

Peer Review History

Original SubmissionNovember 5, 2021
9 Dec 2021 Decision Letter - Susan Nittrouer, Editor PONE-D-21-35370Effects of Word Familiarity and Receptive Vocabulary Size on Speech-in-Noise Recognition Among Young Adults with Normal HearingPLOS ONE Dear Dr. Leibold, Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. I have reviews from one expert in the field, but have been unable to find another scientist with the required expertise to review your manuscript. I have read it myself, and decided to make a decision with the input of the one reviewer and my own assessment. It is my opinion that it would be highly unlikely that input from another reviewer would lead to a different decision, and I don't want you to have to wait any longer. Both the reviewer and I concluded that your study was conducted in largely an appropriate manner and the manuscript itself is well written. Nonetheless, we do have recommendations for you to consider in a revision. 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Read more information on sharing protocols at https://plos.org/protocols?utm_medium=editorial-email&utm_source=authorletters&utm_campaign=protocols. We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript. Kind regards, Susan Nittrouer, Ph.D. Academic Editor PLOS ONE Journal Requirements: When submitting your revision, we need you to address these additional requirements. 1. Please ensure that your manuscript meets PLOS ONE's style requirements, including those for file naming. The PLOS ONE style templates can be found at https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=wjVg/PLOSOne_formatting_sample_main_body.pdf and https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=ba62/PLOSOne_formatting_sample_title_authors_affiliations.pdf. 2. We note that you have stated that you will provide repository information for your data at acceptance. Should your manuscript be accepted for publication, we will hold it until you provide the relevant accession numbers or DOIs necessary to access your data. If you wish to make changes to your Data Availability statement, please describe these changes in your cover letter and we will update your Data Availability statement to reflect the information you provide. 3. Please review your reference list to ensure that it is complete and correct. If you have cited papers that have been retracted, please include the rationale for doing so in the manuscript text, or remove these references and replace them with relevant current references. Any changes to the reference list should be mentioned in the rebuttal letter that accompanies your revised manuscript. If you need to cite a retracted article, indicate the article’s retracted status in the References list and also include a citation and full reference for the retraction notice. Additional Editor Comments: This was a reasonable study. The Introduction was especially well written. The purpose was to examine whether word familiarity and receptive vocabulary size affect speech recognition thresholds for young adults with normal hearing listening to isolated words. Although the study is fine as it is, I had two concerns, both related to the facts that I was not especially fond of the way word familiarity or vocabulary size were assessed and benchmarked. Age of acquisition is an extremely broad term and might not apply to each specific listener in the same manner; instead, age of acquisition may differ across individuals. The PPVT is a relatively insensitive measure of vocabulary size because one need only to have a low level of familiarity with a word in order to be able to select the picture that represents that word. Even measures of expressive vocabulary tap into a slightly deeper level of vocabulary knowledge than receptive vocabulary measures because the subject must retrieve the word from his/her own lexicon. David Pisoni developed a task that derives a more sensitive measure of the depth of a subject’s lexical knowledge; it is the Word Fam task. I highly recommend that task for future work. I also had a slightly different interpretation of the (weak) age-of-acquisition effects that were found. Early-acquired words – which are high frequency, as the authors suggest – may not require listeners to recover phonological structure to the same extent as later-acquired, more ‘difficult’ words. Therefore, less may be needed in terms of acoustic-phonetic information in order to recognize early acquired words. That idea might be important to interpretation of the data obtained in this study, especially if we entertain another notion often invoked when discussing speech-in-noise recognition, and that is the idea of listening in the dips. Although speech-shaped noise has few temporal or spectral dips, it does have some. Later-acquired, less-familiar words may require the listener to recover more “bits” of signal information from across the spectrum and temporal structure than earlier-acquired, more-familiar words. And listeners’ abilities to recover those signal bits and integrate them might help explain individual differences in speech-in-noise recognition. My final comment was that I found the Table 1 difficult to understand. It needs to be revised so that readers can immediately recognize what each row represents. Reviewers' comments: Reviewer's Responses to Questions Comments to the Author 1. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions? The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented. Reviewer #1: Yes ******** 2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #1: Yes ****** 3. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available? The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified. Reviewer #1: Yes ****** 4. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English? PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here. Reviewer #1: Yes ****** 5. Review Comments to the Author Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters) Reviewer #1: The manuscript describes the results of studies of the effects of vocabulary size on open-set speech-in-noise recognition for adults with normal hearing. Data were collected using relatively standard methods, adapted to reflect Covid 19 restrictions. The general finding was that larger vocabulary size was associated with better recognition of speech in noise, consistent with some previous reports from others. A hypothesis that recognition of speech in noise would be associated with age of acquisition (or lexical frequency, with which it is correlated) was not supported. Because of Covid 19, testing was done in the listeners’ home using tablet computers equipped for that purpose. Some sort of accommodation was unavoidable, and that was a reasonable choice that is preferable in some ways to alternatives such as testing online. However, it is not a perfect solution, and I’ve mentioned a few issues in the Specific Comments. Specific comments: Line 122: It would be preferable in a study like this to confirm that the listeners had normal hearing. It seems likely that the authors relied on self-report of hearing status because testing was done remotely, but it would not have been difficult to include a simple pure-tone screening app on the tablet used for the actual study so that’s not a convincing explanation. However, screening would have required better control of absolute presentation level, which listeners were “asked to adjust” (line 197). This situation cannot be changed, but perhaps a brief justification for the choices that were made could be provided. Line 174: Was this talker the same one who recorded the vocabulary words? I don’t think that would affect the outcome, but some readers might want to know. Line 176, “The talker stood approximately 6 inches in front …”: Presumably this was intended to say that the talker’s mouth was 6 inches from the microphone? Line 194-195, “Visual inspection of the [soundcard] output did not reveal any frequency shaping or amplitude compression associated with the soundcard drivers.” This information would be more useful if the measurements had been made on the signals after they’d been transduced by the earphone; that’s where frequency shaping is most likely to be introduced. Even if those measurements were not made prior to testing, presumably they could be made after the fact. ****** 6. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files. If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public. Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review?** For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy. Reviewer #1: No [NOTE: If reviewer comments were submitted as an attachment file, they will be attached to this email and accessible via the submission site. Please log into your account, locate the manuscript record, and check for the action link "View Attachments". If this link does not appear, there are no attachment files.] While revising your submission, please upload your figure files to the Preflight Analysis and Conversion Engine (PACE) digital diagnostic tool, https://pacev2.apexcovantage.com/. PACE helps ensure that figures meet PLOS requirements. To use PACE, you must first register as a user. Registration is free. Then, login and navigate to the UPLOAD tab, where you will find detailed instructions on how to use the tool. If you encounter any issues or have any questions when using PACE, please email PLOS at figures@plos.org. Please note that Supporting Information files do not need this step. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0264581.r001
Revision 1
9 Feb 2022 Author Response Manuscript PONE-D-21-35370 Response to Reviewers Susan Nittrouer Academic Editor PLOS ONE February 9, 2022 Dear Dr. Nittrouer, Thank you for your consideration of our paper entitled “Effects of Word Familiarity and Receptive Vocabulary Size on Speech-in-Noise Recognition Among Young Adults with Normal Hearing” (PONE-D-21-35370) for PLOS ONE, and for enclosing your comments. We have carefully reviewed the comments and have revised the manuscript accordingly. The big issues we addressed were 1) justifying the choice to base participant hearing status on self-report, 2) clarifying some of the signal recording methods, and 3) and improving the readability of Tables 1 and 2. In addition to these changes, we have added an analysis of word duration, which appears to account for the nonmonotonic effect of word duration that we observed behaviorally. Our responses to the reviewer comments are given point-by-point below and our changes to the manuscript are coded in red font. We believe the revised version of the manuscript has improved based on feedback and hope that you now find it suitable for publication. Best, Meredith D. Braza Doctor of Audiology Student The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Response to Reviewer 1: RESP: Thank you for your review of our paper. We have responded to each of your points below. The manuscript describes the results of studies of the effects of vocabulary size on open-set speech-in-noise recognition for adults with normal hearing. Data were collected using relatively standard methods, adapted to reflect Covid 19 restrictions. The general finding was that larger vocabulary size was associated with better recognition of speech in noise, consistent with some previous reports from others. A hypothesis that recognition of speech in noise would be associated with age of acquisition (or lexical frequency, with which it is correlated) was not supported. Because of Covid 19, testing was done in the listeners’ home using tablet computers equipped for that purpose. Some sort of accommodation was unavoidable, and that was a reasonable choice that is preferable in some ways to alternatives such as testing online. However, it is not a perfect solution, and I’ve mentioned a few issues in the Specific Comments. Specific comments Line 122: It would be preferable in a study like this to confirm that the listeners had normal hearing. It seems likely that the authors relied on self-report of hearing status because testing was done remotely, but it would not have been difficult to include a simple pure-tone screening app on the tablet used for the actual study so that’s not a convincing explanation. However, screening would have required better control of absolute presentation level, which listeners were “asked to adjust” (line 197). This situation cannot be changed, but perhaps a brief justification for the choices that were made could be provided. RESP: To move forward with the consenting process, participants had to first verify that they do not believe they have hearing loss and have not had any ear infections in the past year. There is precedent in the psycholinguistics literature for using self-report as an indication of hearing status while doing supra-threshold speech perception experiments. As recruitment was based on word of mouth and included people within social networks of lab staff, many participants had documented normal hearing from participating in our labs previously and/or from being a test subject in the UNC Doctor of Audiology Program. Of the 47 participants in our study, 20 (43%) had normal hearing documented (13 participants in Experiment 1, 7 participants in Experiment 2). Concern over possible hearing loss the remaining participants is tempered by the fact that the main questions of interest in this study were based on comparison of results across conditions. This has been added to the manuscript. Line 174: Was this talker the same one who recorded the vocabulary words? I don’t think that would affect the outcome, but some readers might want to know. RESP: The talker who recorded the target words also recorded the carrier phrase, but a different talker recorded the PPVT words. This has been clarified in the manuscript by specifying each talker’s age. Line 176, “The talker stood approximately 6 inches in front …”: Presumably this was intended to say that the talker’s mouth was 6 inches from the microphone? RESP: Yes, the talker’s mouth was 6 inches from the microphone. This has been clarified in the manuscript. Line 194-195, “Visual inspection of the [soundcard] output did not reveal any frequency shaping or amplitude compression associated with the soundcard drivers.” This information would be more useful if the measurements had been made on the signals after they’d been transduced by the earphone; that’s where frequency shaping is most likely to be introduced. Even if those measurements were not made prior to testing, presumably they could be made after the fact. RESP: The goal of these measurements was to evaluate whether the soundcard was applying any signal conditioning. Many commercially available soundcard drivers modify the spectral and/or amplitude characteristics of the sound in their default configuration (e.g., bass boost or compression). Since this study relied on the soundcard of a tablet, we wanted to confirm that these features were not affecting the signal. Demonstrating linearity of the soundcard allows readers to rely on the frequency response published by the headphone manufacturer. Response to Academic Editor: RESP: Thank you for your review of our paper. We have responded to each of your points below. This was a reasonable study. The Introduction was especially well written. The purpose was to examine whether word familiarity and receptive vocabulary size affect speech recognition thresholds for young adults with normal hearing listening to isolated words. Although the study is fine as it is, I had two concerns, both related to the facts that I was not especially fond of the way word familiarity or vocabulary size were assessed and benchmarked. Age of acquisition is an extremely broad term and might not apply to each specific listener in the same manner; instead, age of acquisition may differ across individuals. The PPVT is a relatively insensitive measure of vocabulary size because one need only to have a low level of familiarity with a word in order to be able to select the picture that represents that word. Even measures of expressive vocabulary tap into a slightly deeper level of vocabulary knowledge than receptive vocabulary measures because the subject must retrieve the word from his/her own lexicon. David Pisoni developed a task that derives a more sensitive measure of the depth of a subject’s lexical knowledge; it is the Word Fam task. I highly recommend that task for future work. RESP: Thank you for the suggestion to consider using the task developed by David Pisoni in our future work. We elected to utilize the PPVT because 1) it is shown to be associated with speech perception outcomes in previous research, and 2) it could be easily adapted to a tablet-based format that was straightforward for remote participants. I also had a slightly different interpretation of the (weak) age-of-acquisition effects that were found. Early-acquired words – which are high frequency, as the authors suggest – may not require listeners to recover phonological structure to the same extent as later-acquired, more ‘difficult’ words. Therefore, less may be needed in terms of acoustic-phonetic information in order to recognize early acquired words. That idea might be important to interpretation of the data obtained in this study, especially if we entertain another notion often invoked when discussing speech-in-noise recognition, and that is the idea of listening in the dips. Although speech-shaped noise has few temporal or spectral dips, it does have some. Later-acquired, less-familiar words may require the listener to recover more “bits” of signal information from across the spectrum and temporal structure than earlier-acquired, more-familiar words. And listeners’ abilities to recover those signal bits and integrate them might help explain individual differences in speech-in-noise recognition. RESP: An association between age of acquisition and the minimum cues required for recognition does seem like a reasonable interpretation of our results. While dips in nominally steady noise could theoretically be associated with performance, variability in target level would likely be the dominant factor in variable audibility over time. Additional discussion of the association between age of acquisition and the number/quality of cues required for recognition has been added to the text. My final comment was that I found the Table 1 difficult to understand. It needs to be revised so that readers can immediately recognize what each row represents. RESP: Each row contains information about a parameter or the interaction between parameters, with factor levels indicated in parentheses. This has been indicated in the legend. The same revisions were made to Table 2. Attachments Attachment Submitted filename: Response to Reviewers 02.09.2022.docx https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0264581.r002
14 Feb 2022 Decision Letter - Susan Nittrouer, Editor Effects of Word Familiarity and Receptive Vocabulary Size on Speech-in-Noise Recognition Among Young Adults with Normal Hearing PONE-D-21-35370R1 Dear Dr. Leibold, Thank you for submitting your revised manuscript to PLOS ONE, and for your careful attention to the comments of the reviewer. At this time we are pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been judged scientifically suitable for publication and will be formally accepted for publication once it meets all outstanding technical requirements. Within one week, you’ll receive an e-mail detailing the required amendments. When these have been addressed, you’ll receive a formal acceptance letter and your manuscript will be scheduled for publication. An invoice for payment will follow shortly after the formal acceptance. To ensure an efficient process, please log into Editorial Manager at http://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/, click the 'Update My Information' link at the top of the page, and double check that your user information is up-to-date. If you have any billing related questions, please contact our Author Billing department directly at authorbilling@plos.org. If your institution or institutions have a press office, please notify them about your upcoming paper to help maximize its impact. If they’ll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team as soon as possible -- no later than 48 hours after receiving the formal acceptance. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information, please contact onepress@plos.org. Kind regards, Susan Nittrouer, Ph.D. Academic Editor PLOS ONE https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0264581.r003
Formally Accepted
2 Mar 2022 Acceptance Letter - Susan Nittrouer, Editor PONE-D-21-35370R1 Effects of Word Familiarity and Receptive Vocabulary Size on Speech-in-Noise Recognition Among Young Adults with Normal Hearing Dear Dr. Leibold: I'm pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been deemed suitable for publication in PLOS ONE. Congratulations! Your manuscript is now with our production department. If your institution or institutions have a press office, please let them know about your upcoming paper now to help maximize its impact. If they'll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team within the next 48 hours. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information please contact onepress@plos.org. If we can help with anything else, please email us at plosone@plos.org. Thank you for submitting your work to PLOS ONE and supporting open access. Kind regards, PLOS ONE Editorial Office Staff on behalf of Dr. Susan Nittrouer Academic Editor PLOS ONE https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0264581.r004

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