Talker Differences in Clear and Conversational Speech: Perceived Sentence Clarity for Young Adults With Normal Hearing and Older Adults With Hearing Loss

Ferguson, Sarah Hargus; Morgan, Shae D.

doi:10.1044/2017_jslhr-h-17-0082

Cited by 17 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 32 publications

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“…Studies have shown that pitch variation and range contribute to speech intelligibility both in quiet and in noise (e.g., Bunton et al, 2001;Laures & Weismer, 1999;Miller et al, 2010). The results of the current study may be in accord with the data from Byrd (1994) and Ferguson (2004), which indicate that females tend to more carefully articulate when recording speech materials, and that the Bclear^speech of females is perceived to have significantly higher clarity than that of male speech (Ferguson & Morgan, 2018). One note of considerable interest is that the male speaker with the highest intelligibility in the current study (76%) was an advanced student in a graduate audiology program who had been trained to speak clearly to listeners with hearing loss.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 88%

“…The talker with the highest rating from Experiment 1 (Female 4) had an overall rating of 4.64 and the talker with the lowest rating (Male 1) had an overall rating of 2.58. That is a wider range than was found by Ferguson and Morgan (2018), which also had listeners rate intelligibility of male and female speech using a 7-point scale. The highest and lowest rated talkers in that study (when speaking conversationally) were on average 5.1 and 3.42, respectively.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 84%

“…However, correlations between these ratings and acoustic analyses of talkers' voices (i.e., F0, F0 range, formant frequency, formant range, vowel working space area, vowel dispersion) were low. Likewise, Ferguson and Morgan (2018) found that listeners rated female voices as clearer than male voices when the talkers were utilizing Bclear speech.^Unfortunately, it is difficult to make direct comparisons between these different objective and subjective methodologies due to the many other differences that exist across the studies.…”

Section: Effects Of Methodologymentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Are there sex effects for speech intelligibility in American English? Examining the influence of talker, listener, and methodology

Yoho

Borrie

Barrett

et al. 2018

Atten Percept Psychophys

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Talker and listener sex in speech processing has been largely unknown and under-appreciated to this point, with many studies overlooking the possible influences. In the current study, the effects of both talker and listener sex on speech intelligibility were assessed. Different methodological approaches to measuring intelligibility (percent words correct vs. subjective rating scales) and collecting data (laboratoryvs.crowdsourcing)were alsoevaluated.Findings revealed that,regardless of methodology,thespokenproductions offemale talkers were overall more intelligible than the spoken productions of male talkers; however, substantial variability across talkers was observed. Findings also revealed that when data were collected in the lab, there was an interaction between talker and listener sex. This interaction between listener and talker sex was not observed when subjective ratings were crowdsourced from listener subjects across the USA via Amazon Mechanical Turk, although overall ratings remained similar. This possibly suggests that subjective intelligibility ratings may be vulnerable to bias, and such biases may be reduced by recruiting a more heterogeneous subject pool. Many studies in speech perception do not account for these talker, listener, and methodology effects. However, the present results suggest that researchers should carefully consider these effects when assessing speech intelligibility in different conditions, and when comparing findings across studies that have used different subject demographics and/or methodologies.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 88%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 84%

Section: Effects Of Methodologymentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Are there sex effects for speech intelligibility in American English? Examining the influence of talker, listener, and methodology

Yoho

Borrie

Barrett

et al. 2018

Atten Percept Psychophys

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…For the minimum speaking effort, the talker was instructed to speak as if she was speaking to one NH listener in a quiet room. For the medium speaking effort, she was instructed to speak as she would to an NH listener in an everyday conversation, and for the maximum speaking effort, she was instructed to speak as if she was talking to a person with a hearing loss ( Ferguson and Morgan, 2018 ). There were 42 sound files (14 consonants × 3 speaking efforts).…”

Section: Experiments 1: Identify Target and Conflicting Frequency And Time Rangesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…They had normal hearing, which was verified through a pure-tone audiometry test. Each of the 42 sound files was randomly presented five times in quiet via headphones, and each lab member was asked to rate “how clearly the sound was spoken” on a scale from 1 to 7: 1—lowest possible clarity, 2—very unclear, 3—somewhat unclear, 4—midway, 5—somewhat clear, 6—very clear, and 7—highest possible clarity ( Ferguson and Morgan, 2018 ). The lab members made their selections by clicking on the desired category from the graphical user interface and then pressing the “next” key to continue.…”

Section: Experiments 1: Identify Target and Conflicting Frequency And Time Rangesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Effect of the Target and Conflicting Frequency and Time Ranges on Consonant Enhancement in Normal-Hearing Listeners

Yoon

2021

Front. Psychol.

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In this paper, the effects of intensifying useful frequency and time regions (target frequency and time ranges) and the removal of detrimental frequency and time regions (conflicting frequency and time ranges) for consonant enhancement were determined. Thirteen normal-hearing (NH) listeners participated in two experiments. In the first experiment, the target and conflicting frequency and time ranges for each consonant were identified under a quiet, dichotic listening condition by analyzing consonant confusion matrices. The target frequency range was defined as the frequency range that provided the highest performance and was decreased 40% from the peak performance from both high-pass filtering (HPF) and low-pass filtering (LPF) schemes. The conflicting frequency range was defined as the frequency range that yielded the peak errors of the most confused consonants and was 20% less than the peak error from both filtering schemes. The target time range was defined as a consonant segment that provided the highest performance and was decreased 40% from that peak performance when the duration of the consonant was systematically truncated from the onset. The conflicting time ranges were defined on the coincided target time range because, if they temporarily coincide, the conflicting frequency ranges would be the most detrimental factor affecting the target frequency ranges. In the second experiment, consonant recognition was binaurally measured in noise under three signal processing conditions: unprocessed, intensified target ranges by a 6-dB gain (target), and combined intensified target and removed conflicting ranges (target-conflicting). The results showed that consonant recognition improved significantly with the target condition but greatly deteriorated with a target-conflicting condition. The target condition helped transmit voicing and manner cues while the target-conflicting condition limited the transmission of these cues. Confusion analyses showed that the effect of the signal processing on consonant improvement was consonant-specific: the unprocessed condition was the best for /da, pa, ma, sa/; the target condition was the best for /ga, fa, va, za, ʒa/; and the target-conflicting condition was the best for /na, ʃa/. Perception of /ba, ta, ka/ was independent of the signal processing. The results suggest that enhancing the target ranges is an efficient way to improve consonant recognition while the removal of conflicting ranges negatively impacts consonant recognition.

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An automated framework to evaluate soft skills using posture and disfluency detection

Gulati,

Dwivedi,

Kumar

et al. 2023

Machine Vision and Applications

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Talker Differences in Clear and Conversational Speech: Perceived Sentence Clarity for Young Adults With Normal Hearing and Older Adults With Hearing Loss

Abstract: Perceived clarity varies widely among talkers, but nearly all produce clear speech that sounds significantly clearer than their conversational speech. Few differences were seen between OHI and YNH listeners except the effect of talker gender.

Cited by 17 publications

References 32 publications

Are there sex effects for speech intelligibility in American English? Examining the influence of talker, listener, and methodology

Are there sex effects for speech intelligibility in American English? Examining the influence of talker, listener, and methodology

Effect of the Target and Conflicting Frequency and Time Ranges on Consonant Enhancement in Normal-Hearing Listeners

An automated framework to evaluate soft skills using posture and disfluency detection

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