The Intelligibility of Interrupted Speech

Abstract

G. A. MILLER AND J. C. R. LICKLIDER loo FREOUENCY OF INTERRUPTION 1 lo ooo [FIG. 2. Word articulation as a function of rate of interruption for a speech-time fraction of 0.5. Curve (1) was obtained with naive listeners, (2) with the same listeners after a few days practice, (3) again with the same listeners, but with a system having a more uniform frequency-response characteristic. Regularly Spaced Interruptions Consider first the results obtained with regularly spaced interruptions and a speech-time fraction of 0.5. The frequency of interruption was varied between 0.! and 10,000 per second. In Fig. 2 the percentage of the words heard correctly is plotted on the ordinate, and the frequency of interruption is given on the abscissa. The three curves of Fig. 2 were obtained under slightly different conditions. Curve 1 is based on the tests conducted at the beginning of the experiments. The listeners had never before served as subjects in articulation tests. Curve 2 was obtained after a few

Illusory Vowels Resulting from Perceptual Continuity: A Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Study

“…Over the last few decades, the continuity illusion has been extensively studied in behavioral experiments using a variety of stimuli, including pure and modulated tones, tone glides, and speech (Carlyon, Micheyl, Deeks, & Moore, 2002;Warren, Wrightson, & Puretz, 1988;Ciocca & Bregman, 1987;Powers & Wilcox, 1977;Houtgast, 1972;Warren, Obusek, & Ackroff, 1972;Vicario, 1960;Miller & Licklider, 1950). The results of all these studies have led to a firm understanding of the stimulus parameters that do and do not lead to a percept of illusory continuity.…”

Factors affecting the development of speech recognition in steady and modulated noise

“…Recent investigations have indicated that the speech recognition advantage in modulated noise is smaller in school-age children than in adults Hall et al, 2014). One interpretation of this finding is that children may have more difficulty than adults in correctly identifying speech on the basis of fragments or "glimpses" that are available in the envelope minima of modulated masking noises (e.g., Miller and Licklider, 1950;Howard-Jones and Rosen, 1993;Assmann and Summerfield, 2004;Buss et al, 2004;Cooke, 2006;Hall et al, 2008).…”

“…The results were also consistent with the idea that children are relatively poor in integrating speech cues when the frequency regions with the best signal-to-noise ratios vary across frequency as a function of time. Many studies have demonstrated that speech recognition is generally better in a temporally modulated masking noise than in steady noise (e.g., Miller and Licklider, 1950;Gustafsson and Arlinger, 1994). Recent investigations have indicated that the speech recognition advantage in modulated noise is smaller in school-age children than in adults Hall et al, 2014).…”

Phonemic restoration effect reversed in a reverberant room

“…The effect has been shown to produce objectively higher intelligibility (Bashford et al, 1992;Shinn-Cunningham and Wang, 2007) and can be enhanced when multimodal input is made available to the listener (Shahin and Miller, 2009). Overall, the phonemic restoration effect may be considered as a special case of interrupted speech perception (Miller and Licklider, 1950) in which top-down compensation factors such as context, expectation, and linguistic rules are thought to account for relatively intact word recognition even when significant portions of the speech are missing (Bashford et al, 1992). One aspect of the phonemic restoration effect that has not been previously considered is the role of the listening environment, which can under certain situations cause significant changes to the speech and interruption signals reaching the ears.…”