Speech intelligibility and talker gender classification with noise-vocoded and tone-vocoded speech

Villard, Sarah; Kidd, Gerald

doi:10.1121/10.0006285

Cited by 5 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 27 publications

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“…No acoustic interferers were used in this experiment, but in terms of the framework for adverse listening conditions proposed by Mattys et al (2009), the perceptual load associated with high-resolution vocoding should have an EM component (here, signal degradation) associated with any loss of target intelligibility and an IM component (cognitive load) associated with the extent of change in stimulus naturalness. The EM component should increase the reliance on acoustic detail but should be small given that-at least for word identification in sentences-there is no intelligibility cost for MNB and MSB vocoding relative to natural speech when the number of channels is !16 (Villard and Kidd, 2021). The IM component should act to increase the reliance on lexical information and was predicted to be considerably larger for the MSB than for the MNB stimuli.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 97%

Effects of stimulus naturalness and contralateral interferers on lexical bias in consonant identification

Roberts

Summers

Bailey

2022

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

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Lexical bias is the tendency to perceive an ambiguous speech sound as a phoneme completing a word; more ambiguity typically causes greater reliance on lexical knowledge. A speech sound ambiguous between /g/ and /k/ is more likely to be perceived as /g/ before /ɪft/ and as /k/ before /ɪs/. The magnitude of this difference—the Ganong shift—increases when high cognitive load limits available processing resources. The effects of stimulus naturalness and informational masking on Ganong shifts and reaction times were explored. Tokens between /gɪ/ and /kɪ/ were generated using morphing software, from which two continua were created (“giss”–“kiss” and “gift”–“kift”). In experiment 1, Ganong shifts were considerably larger for sine- than noise-vocoded versions of these continua, presumably because the spectral sparsity and unnatural timbre of the former increased cognitive load. In experiment 2, noise-vocoded stimuli were presented alone or accompanied by contralateral interferers with constant within-band amplitude envelope, or within-band envelope variation that was the same or different across bands. The latter, with its implied spectro-temporal variation, was predicted to cause the greatest cognitive load. Reaction-time measures matched this prediction; Ganong shifts showed some evidence of greater lexical bias for frequency-varying interferers, but were influenced by context effects and diminished over time.

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 97%

Effects of stimulus naturalness and contralateral interferers on lexical bias in consonant identification

Roberts

Summers

Bailey

2022

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…The rationale for using this type of NVS was that potential context-driven auditory learning effects are, generally, maximal when the auditory signal is poor, but still contains sufficient information to allow for context-driven perceptual restoration. Prior research has indicated that NVS word identification accuracy at least doubles when moving up from 2 to 4 channels, but then increases with about half that effect size when moving from 4 to 8 channels (where accuracy tapered-off and was comparable to 16 and 32 channel NVS, [ 36 ]). Moreover, two-year-olds start to show the first signs of word recognition with 4-channel NVS (when compared to 2-channel NVS, [ 37 ]), and Senan et al [ 38 ] showed that dual task interference from 4-channel NVS was in between, but statistically comparable to 2-channel and 6-channel NVS (the primary task was a digit-recall task), whereas interference from 4 and 6-channel NVS was also statistically comparable to natural speech.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Want to quickly adapt to distorted speech and become a better listener? Read lips, not text

et al. 2022

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When listening to distorted speech, does one become a better listener by looking at the face of the speaker or by reading subtitles that are presented along with the speech signal? We examined this question in two experiments in which we presented participants with spectrally distorted speech (4-channel noise-vocoded speech). During short training sessions, listeners received auditorily distorted words or pseudowords that were partially disambiguated by concurrently presented lipread information or text. After each training session, listeners were tested with new degraded auditory words. Learning effects (based on proportions of correctly identified words) were stronger if listeners had trained with words rather than with pseudowords (a lexical boost), and adding lipread information during training was more effective than adding text (a lipread boost). Moreover, the advantage of lipread speech over text training was also found when participants were tested more than a month later. The current results thus suggest that lipread speech may have surprisingly long-lasting effects on adaptation to distorted speech.

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Strength of target source segregation cues affects the outcome of speech-on-speech masking experiments

Roverud

Villard

Kidd

2023

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

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In speech-on-speech listening experiments, some means for designating which talker is the “target” must be provided for the listener to perform better than chance. However, the relative strength of the segregation variables designating the target could affect the results of the experiment. Here, we examine the interaction of two source segregation variables—spatial separation and talker gender differences—and demonstrate that the relative strengths of these cues may affect the interpretation of the results. Participants listened to sentence pairs spoken by different-gender target and masker talkers, presented naturally or vocoded (degrading gender cues), either colocated or spatially separated. Target and masker words were temporally interleaved to eliminate energetic masking in either an every-other-word or randomized order of presentation. Results showed that the order of interleaving had no effect on recall performance. For natural speech with strong talker gender cues, spatial separation of sources yielded no improvement in performance. For vocoded speech with degraded talker gender cues, performance improved significantly with spatial separation of sources. These findings reveal that listeners may shift among target source segregation cues contingent on cue viability. Finally, performance was poor when the target was designated after stimulus presentation, indicating strong reliance on the cues.

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Speech intelligibility and talker gender classification with noise-vocoded and tone-vocoded speech

Cited by 5 publications

References 27 publications

Effects of stimulus naturalness and contralateral interferers on lexical bias in consonant identification

Effects of stimulus naturalness and contralateral interferers on lexical bias in consonant identification

Want to quickly adapt to distorted speech and become a better listener? Read lips, not text

Strength of target source segregation cues affects the outcome of speech-on-speech masking experiments

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