Abstract Listeners quickly learn to understand speech that has been distorted, and this process is enhanced when comprehension is constrained by higher-level knowledge. In three experiments, we investigated whether this knowledge enhances comprehension of distorted speech because it allows listeners to predict (1) the meaning of the distorted utterance, or (2) the lower-level wordforms. Participants listened to question-answer sequences, in which questions were clearly-spoken but answers were noise-vocoded. Comprehension (Experiment 1) and learning (Experiment 2) were enhanced when listeners could use the question to predict the semantics of the distorted answer, but were not enhanced by predictions of answer form. Form predictions enhanced comprehension only when questions and answers were significantly separated by time and intervening linguistic material (Experiment 3). Together, these results suggest that high-level semantic predictions enhance comprehension and learning, with form predictions playing only a minimal role.

中文翻译：

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自上而下的处理如何增强对噪声声码语音的理解：对意义的预测比对形式的预测更重要

摘要 听者很快学会理解失真的语音，当理解受到更高层次知识的限制时，这个过程会得到加强。在三个实验中，我们研究了这种知识是否能增强对失真语音的理解，因为它允许听者预测 (1) 失真话语的含义，或 (2) 较低级别的词形。参与者听取了问答序列，其中问题被清楚地说出，但答案是噪声编码的。当听众可以使用问题来预测扭曲答案的语义时，理解（实验 1）和学习（实验 2）得到增强，但答案形式的预测没有增强。只有当问题和答案被时间和中间语言材料显着分开时，形式预测才能增强理解（实验 3）。总之，这些结果表明，高级语义预测增强了理解和学习，而形式预测只发挥了最小的作用。