Meeting 3: Factors adversely impacting the perception of affect and speech
by Prof. dr. Ilse Wambacq, Associate Professor and Doctoral Program Director at the Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders from Montclair State University New Jersey, USA
date: 28-10-2021
time: 11:00
link: expired
Abstract
The communication of meaning and emotions is an integral part of daily human interactions. What happens to successful communication when these forms of interactions take place in adverse listening conditions? In our research, we study the impact of factors intrinsic and extrinsic to the target signal on the cognitive neurophysiology of speech and affect perception. In our line of studies on the intrinsic factors, we show that the absence of certain frequency regions influences how emotions are perceived in music and in non-verbal human vocalizations along the dimensions of valence and arousal, and how non-native accents impact speech perception. In a second line of experiments, we delve deeper into how extrinsic factors, such as the presence of background music or of another conversation, affect meaningful processing of spoken messages. Behavioral and electrophysiological indices reflecting cognitive processes of attention, working memory and semantic retrieval/integration are used to illustrate how our ability to process a target communication is controlled by environmental factors surrounding the target signal.