The Intelligibility of Interrupted Speech Depends Upon Its Uninterrupted Intelligibility

Recognition of sentences containing periodic, 5-Hz, silent interruptions of differing duty cycles was assessed for three types of processed speech. Processing conditions employed different combinations of spectral resolution and the availability of fundamental frequency (F0) information, chosen to yield similar, below-ceiling performance for uninterrupted speech. Performance declined with decreasing duty cycle similarly for each processing condition, suggesting that, at least for certain forms of speech processing and interruption rates, performance with interrupted speech may reflect that obtained with uninterrupted speech. This highlights the difficulty in interpreting differences in interrupted speech performance across conditions for which uninterrupted performance is at ceiling.