The intelligibility of speech as a function of the context of the test materials.

Abstract

For many years communication engineers have used a psychophysical method called the "articulation test" (2, 3). An announcer reads lists :of syllables, words, or sentences to a group of listeners who report what they hear. The articulation score is the percentage of discrete test units reported correctly by the listeners. This method gives a quantitative evaluation of the performance of a speech communication system. There are three classes of variables involved in an articulation test: the personnel, talkers and listeners; the test materials, syllables, words, sen" tences, or continuous discourse; and the communication equipment, rooms, microphones, amplifiers, radios, earphones, etc. The present paper is ^directed toward the second of these three classes of variables, the test materials. The central concern can be stated as follows: Why is a stimulus configuration, a word, heard correctly in one context and incorrectly in another? Three kinds of contexts are explored: (a) context supplied by the knowledge that the test item is one of a small vocabulary of items, (b) context supplied by the items that precede or follow a given item in a word or sentence, and (c) context supplied by the knowl

Development and evaluation of Polish digit triplet test for auditory screening

“…In other words, in masking conditions the listeners' performance turned out to be much better when they were presented with digit triplets rather than meaningful sentences. This is because the triplet material itself is actually composed of 10 words, which markedly improves speech intelligibility (Miller et al, 1951;Smits et al, 2004). The difference between SRTs obtained for digit triplets and sentence material is in agreement with the results of measurements for the Dutch language for which SRTs obtained for digit triplet test (Smits et al, 2004) and sentence test (Plomp and Mimpen, 1979) are -11.2 dB and -5.5 dB, respectively.…”

“…They have been used for speech intelligibility measurements and for clinical purposes (Fletcher, 1929;Pruszewicz et al, 1994a, b), auditory screening (Smits et al, 2004;Wagener et al, 2005a) and in studies on the influence of speech context on intelligibility (Miller et al, 1951;Kalikow et al, 1977). They have been also used for a study devoted to pronunciation differences between native and non-native American English speakers (Schmidt-Nielsen, 1989).…”

Production and perception of speaker-specific phonetic detail at word boundaries

“…Embedding speech in noise has been shown to produce sufficient errors of word identification for gross and subtle influences on processing to be assessed (Miller, Heise, & Lichten 1951, Heinrich et al, 2010.…”

Behavioral and fMRI evidence that cognitive ability modulates the effect of semantic context on speech intelligibility

“…Audibility influences the relative importance of these processes (c.f., Plomp, 2002;Rönnberg, Rudner, Lunner, & Zekveld, 2010). When hearing is challenged by interfering noise and/or hearing impairment, contextual information, prior knowledge and experience play a greater role in driving perception (Rönnberg, 2003;Rönnberg, Rudner, Foo, & Lunner, 2008;Wingfield & Tun, 2007;Norris & McQueen, 2008;Miller, Heise, & Lichten, 1951;Miller & Isard, 1963, Tesink et al, 2009Nakano, Saron, & Swaab, 2010;Hagoort & van Berkum, 2007;Drager & Reichle, 2001). …”