Much of what we know about speech perception comes from laboratory studies with clean, canonical speech, ideal listeners and artificial tasks. But how do interlocutors manage to communicate effectively in the seemingly less-than-ideal conditions of everyday listening, which frequently involve trying to make sense of speech while listening in a non-native language, or in the presence of competing sound sources, or while multitasking? In this talk I’ll examine the effect of real-world conditions on speech perception and quantify the contributions made by factors such as binaural hearing, visual information and prior knowledge to speech communication in noise. .
