Recognition of natural and time/intensity altered CVs by young and elderly subjects with normal hearing

Gordon‐Salant, Sandra

doi:10.1121/1.394324

Cited by 102 publications

(57 citation statements)

References 28 publications

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“…Using a consonant identification task in a set of nonsense CV/VCV syllables, consonant intelligibility has been found to increase in a background of noise when their intensity relative to that of vowels was enhanced (Gordon-Salant, 1986;Hazan and Simpson, 1998;Skowronski and Harris, 2006). Hazan and Simpson (1998) reported significant improvement by applying amplitude enhancement to the formant transition regions at vowel onset and offset as well as the perceptually-important spectral regions of consonants.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…greater discrimination between vowel categories) has also been shown to benefit speech intelligibility (Bond and Moore, 1994;Ferguson and Kewley-Port, 2002). In the presence of noise, Gordon-Salant (1986) and Hazan and Simpson (1998) found that enhancement of consonant-to-vowel (C/V) amplitude ratio by 10 dB increased intelligibility by up to 10 percentage points. It has also been reported that the fine-grained acoustic-phonetic consequences of precision of articulation are able to affect speech intelligibility in noise (Bond and Moore, 1994;Hazan and Simpson, 1998).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The contribution of changes in F0 and spectral tilt to increased intelligibility of speech produced in noise

Cooke

2009

Speech Communication

138

100

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To cite this version:Youyi Lu, Martin Cooke. The contribution of changes in F0 and spectral tilt to increased intelligibility of speech produced in noise. Speech Communication, Elsevier : North-Holland, 2009, 51 (12) This is a PDF file of an unedited manuscript that has been accepted for publication. As a service to our customers we are providing this early version of the manuscript. The manuscript will undergo copyediting, typesetting, and review of the resulting proof before it is published in its final form. Please note that during the production process errors may be discovered which could affect the content, and all legal disclaimers that apply to the journal pertain. ACCEPTED MANUSCRIPT AbstractTalkers modify the way they speak in the presence of noise. As well as increases in voice level and fundamental frequency (F0), a flattening of spectral tilt is observed.The resulting "Lombard speech" is typically more intelligible than speech produced in quiet, even when level differences are removed. What is the cause of the enhanced intelligibility of Lombard speech? The current study explored the relative contributions to intelligibility of changes in mean F0 and spectral tilt. The roles of F0and spectral tilt were assessed by measuring the intelligibility gain of non-Lombard speech whose mean F0 and spectrum were manipulated, both independently and in concert, to simulate those of natural Lombard speech. In the presence of speechshaped noise, flattening of spectral tilt contributed greatly to the intelligibility gain of noise-induced speech over speech produced in quiet while an increase in F0 did not have a significant influence. The perceptual effects of spectrum flattening was attributed to its ability of increasing the amount of speech time-frequency plane "glimpsed" in the presence of noise. However, spectral tilt changes alone could not fully account for the intelligibility of Lombard speech. Other changes observed in Lombard speech such as durational modifications may well contribute to intelligibility.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The contribution of changes in F0 and spectral tilt to increased intelligibility of speech produced in noise

Cooke

2009

Speech Communication

138

100

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“…Consonants /t, k/ are voiceless sounds, occurring about 50 [ms] before the onset of voicing while /d, g/ have a VOT <20 [ms]. Gordon-Salant (1986) approached the question of primary acoustic features by increasing the consonant to vowel energy ratio. The tests were performed on young and old listeners, using real speech at an SNR of þ6 [dB] and at 75 and 90 [dB-SPL], with 19 consonants and three vowels.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Perceptual effects of plosive feature modification

Kapoor

Allen

2012

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

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In the 1970-1980's, a number of papers explored the role of the transitional and burst features in consonant-vowel context. These papers left unresolved the relative importance of these two acoustic cues. This research takes advantage of refined signal processing methods, allowing for the visualization and modification of acoustic details. This experiment explores the impact of modifying the strength of the acoustic burst feature on the recognition scores P c (SNR) (function of the signal-to-noise ratio), for four plosive sounds /ta, ka, da, ga/. These results show high correlations between the relative burst intensity and the scores P c (SNR). Based on this correlation, one must conclude that these bursts are the primary acoustic cues used for the identification of these four consonants. This is in contrast to previous experiments, which used less precise methods to manipulate speech, and observe complex relationships between the scores, bursts and transition cues. In cases where the burst feature is removed entirely, it is shown that naturally existing conflicting acoustic features dominate the score. These observations seem directly inconsistent with transition cues playing a role: if the transition cues were important, they would dominate over low-level conflicting burst cues. These limited results arguably rule out the concept of redundant cues.

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“…Previous studies have found age-related decrements in consonant identification when consonants are presented in nonsense syllables [8,12,15,18]. However, Dubno et al found no overall age-related changes in word recognition in audiometrically matched subjects ranging in age from 55 to 84 yr, suggesting that agerelated deficits in consonant identification may not be evident for lexically meaningful tokens [19].…”

mentioning

confidence: 69%

“…A number of studies have suggested that phonological processing in noise is impaired by advancing age [12][13][14]. For example, Gelfand et al used the City University of New York Nonsense Syllable Test to examine consonant discrimination in younger and older subjects with audiometric thresholds better than 25 dB at 250 to 8,000 Hz [15].…”

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confidence: 99%

Age-related changes in consonant and sentence processing

Woods

Doss²,

Herron³

et al. 2012

JRRD

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Abstract-Speech understanding in noise declines with age, even in older subjects with normal hearing (ONH). These agerelated declines could reflect reductions in phonological processing ability or impairments in semantic and lexical processing required for sentence understanding. In experiment 1, we used the California Syllable Test (CaST) to examine age-related changes in the ability of subjects to identify consonants in consonant-vowel-consonant syllables in noise. ONH subjects showed impaired performance in comparison with younger subjects with normal hearing, particularly for hard-to-identify consonants, but otherwise showed similar influences of consonant position, lexicality, and vowel nuclei. Regression analyses showed that CaST performance was independently affected by both age and audiometric thresholds. In experiment 2, we examined sentence reception thresholds (SeRTs) using the Quick Speech in Noise Test and Hearing in Noise Test. No significant age-related changes in SeRTs were observed for either test. SeRT preservation in ONH subjects appeared to reflect the ageresistant ability to identify easy consonants in noise as well as intact top-down contextual and lexical processing. These results establish benchmark values that can be used to evaluate the success of audiological rehabilitation in older subjects with hearing impairment.

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Recognition of natural and time/intensity altered CVs by young and elderly subjects with normal hearing

Cited by 102 publications

References 28 publications

The contribution of changes in F0 and spectral tilt to increased intelligibility of speech produced in noise

The contribution of changes in F0 and spectral tilt to increased intelligibility of speech produced in noise

Perceptual effects of plosive feature modification

Age-related changes in consonant and sentence processing

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