Influence of social and semantic context in processing speech in noise

Social interactions occupy a substantial part of our life, and listening to others’ interactions is critical in understanding our social world. Although the role of semantics in speech comprehension has been studied, the role of social context, and its interaction with semantics, remain unknown. We conducted a series of four perceptual experiments to better understand the processing of multiple-speaker conversations from a third-person viewpoint, manipulating the social and semantic context of a conversation. We used a stimulus set consisting of two-speaker dialogues or one-speaker monologues (factor: social context) arranged in intact or sentence-scrambled order (factor: semantic context). Each stimuli comprised five sentences, with the fifth sentence embedded in multi-talker babbling noise. This fifth sentence was subsequently repeated without noise, with a single word altered or unchanged. Stimuli were presented to healthy young adults, asked whether the repeated sentence was same as or different from previous in-noise sentence. We found significant effects for both social and semantic contexts when processing a conversation. Our findings highlight that both semantic and social aspects of a conversation can modulate the processing of conversations. These results raise new questions regarding predictive or other mechanisms that may be at play when perceiving speech in social contexts.