This thesis analyses the question of the regulation, motivated by egalitarian concerns, of homophobic hate speech and homosexual pornography. I attempt to . critically evaluate what both liberal humanism and postmodernism can tell us about these types of speech, and how we should best treat them, in a framework that takes lesbians' and gays' equality as the underlying organising principle. Although homosexual pornography cannot be convincingly exempted from regulation by affirming that it is not, contrary to heterosexual pornography, implicated in gender oppression, the importance of free speech and the complexity of all pornography messages suggest that the state is not justified in suppressing sex expression relying on the reification of a single viewpoint about its harmfulness. The Law, in limiting pornography on the basis of the radical feminist rationale that assimilates it to hate speech, ends up making strong and arbitrary claims to truth, that are premised on doubtful assumptions, silence alternative knowledges, subjugate outsiders' experiences, and contribute to the creation of oppressive social identities. I advise against censoring pornography out of egalitarian concerns, and argue that, under certain conditions, engagement with court litigation and the deployment of the rights discourse can be promising strategies for lesbians and gay men challenging such obscenity laws. Hate speech seems more evidently linked to discrimination than pornography, and speech act theory suggests that it enacts a specific kind of subordination. However, the role played by homophobic hate speech in perpetuating inequality for queers is limited when compared to other social/discursive practices: thus hate speech laws are the easiest but also, taken on their own, a largely ineffective way of responding to homophobia. As such, these laws bear a presumption of being an unnecessary burden on freedom of expression, a liberty that minorities have a vested interest in keeping as intact as possible. Against homophobia a radical measure is required that, focusing on education, will actively promote equality values. This remedy will be consistent with free speech doctrine to the extent that hate speech will, setting apart some specific cases, escape regulation, and that the State will assume an attitude directed to reaching understanding. / Law, Peter A. Allard School of / Graduate

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Nineteen normal-hearing university undergraduates performed an "objective" and a "subjective" test of speech intelligibility accuracy (SIA), speed (SIS) and ease (SIE) for different levels of low-pass filtered speech. During objective testing subjects listened to monosyllabic words low-pass filtered through an earphone, and repeated words as correctly and quickly as possible. They simultaneously turned off a probe light as quickly as possible whenever it appeared. Objective SIA was assessed as percentage of incorrectly-repeated phonemes, objective SIS as elapsed time between word presentation and a subject's voice response, and objective SIE as probe-reaction time to turning off the light. During subjective testing subjects listened to common sentences low-pass filtered through a loudspeaker in a background of competing speech. Subjective SIA, SIS and SIE were assessed using magnitude estimation in which subjects assigned numbers to how accurately, quickly or easily they understood the sentences. The most important finding was generally improved accuracy, speed and ease of objectively- and subjectively-measured speech intelligibility with decreased filtering. The experimenter further analyzed results by determining how well each measure of SIA, SIS and SIE met assumptions of test sensitivity, selectivity, reliability, convergence, discriminability and sufficiency. Overall, the objective SIA measure best met assumptions, followed by the three subjective measures, the objective SIS measure, and the objective SIE measure. Results have clinical and research implications for testing and understanding normal and impaired speech intelligibility and perception. First, results are encouraging for audiologists who use objective SIA and subjective measures to test speech intelligibility of their patients. Second, results suggest that persons listening to degraded speech, or persons with auditory problems, may have difficulties in SIS and SIE as well as problems already documented for SIA. Accordingly, audiologists should consider SIS and SIE during audiologic evaluations, aural rehabilitation, and auditory research. Finally, a few subjects showed exceptionally fast voice-response and probe-reaction times which has implications for understanding the nature and limits of human auditory processing.

This study investigated the extent to which noise impacts speech processing of sentences that vary in intelligibility for normal-hearing young adults. Intelligibility and recognition memory in noise were examined for conversational and clear speech sentences recorded in quiet (QS) and in response to the environmental noise, i.e. noise adapted speech (NAS). Results showed that 1) increased intelligibility through conversational-to-clear speech modifications lead to improved recognition memory and 2) NAS presented a more naturalistic speech adaptation to noise compared to QS, leading to more accurate word recognition and better sentence recall. These results demonstrate that acoustic-phonetic modifications implemented in listener-oriented speech enhance speech processing beyond word recognition. The results are in line with the effortfulness hypothesis (McCoy et al., 2005), which states that speech perception in challenging listening environments requires additional processing resources that might otherwise be available for encoding speech in memory. This resource reallocation may be offset by speaking style adaptations on the part of the talker. In addition to enhanced intelligibility, a substantial improvement in recognition memory can be achieved through speaker adaptations to the environment and to the listener when in adverse conditions. / text