SPATS: Speech perception assessment and training system

Abstract

A software system, SPATS (patent pending), that tests and trains important bottom-up and combined bottom-up/top-down speech-perception skills is described. Bottom-up skills are the abilities to identify the constituents of syllables: onsets, nuclei, and codas in quiet and noise as produced by eight talkers. Top-down skills are the abilities to use knowledge of linguistic context to identify words in spoken sentences. The sentence module in SPATS emphasizes combined bottom-up/top-down abilities in perceiving sentences in noise. The word-initial onsets, stressed nuclei, and word-final codas are ranked in importance and grouped into subsets based on their importance. Testing utilizes random presentation of all the items included in a subset. Training in Quiet (SNR = 40 dB) or in Noise (SNR = 5 dB), is adaptively focused on individual listener's learnable items of intermediate difficulty. Alternatively, SNR-adaption training uses Kaernbach's algorithm to find the SNR required for a target percent correct. The unique sentence module trains the combination of bottom-up (hearing) with top-down (use of linguistic context) abilities to identify words in meaningful sentences in noise. Scoring in the sentence module is objective and automatic.

Syllable-constituent perception by hearing-aid users: Common factors in quiet and noise

“…This procedure guarantees that in the long run all tokens are equally likely to be selected. The response screen (not shown) represents all 28 nuclei arranged in a manner that reflects the similarities between the usual oral monophthongs and diphthongs, rhotic diphthongs, and lateral diphthongs (vowels combined with dark el) as described in Miller et al (2008a). Since all 28 nuclei are equally likely, chance performance on a nucleus test is 100(1/28) or 3.57%.…”

“…This procedure guarantees that in the long run all tokens are equally likely to be selected. The response screen (not shown) displays all 45 onsets in an arrangement that reflects the manner, voicing, and place of articulation of each onset (Miller et al, 2008a). Since all 45 onsets are equally likely, chance performance on an onset test is 100(1/45) or 2.22%.…”

“…Syllable nuclei. The 28 syllable nuclei included in SPATS are shown in Table IV. These are spoken by eight talkers in an /h_d/ context, as described in Miller et al (2008a). Thus, each nucleus is represented by eight tokens.…”

“…More detailed information regarding these speech sounds can be found in Miller et al (2008a);Miller et al (2008c);and Watson and Miller (2013). Within each constituent category, individual constituents were ranked separately for textual frequency of occurrence and lexical frequency of occurrence.…”

“…Following in this tradition, investigators at Communication Disorders Technology, Inc (CDT) have developed a Speech Perception Assessment and Training System (SPATS) that utilizes the measurement and training of the intelligibility of 109 syllable constituents shown to be of importance in the phonetic structure of spoken English. The details of this flexible system have been described elsewhere (Miller et al, 2008a;Miller et al, 2008b;Watson and Miller, 2013). The developers of the SPATS software believe that failures in the identification of syllable constituents may be more readily associated with severity and patterns of hearing loss than the more abstract concepts such as phonemes or speech features.…”