Speech intelligibility in the presence of cross-channel spectral asynchrony

The spectrum of spoken sentences was partitioned into quarteroctave channels and the onset of each channel shifted in time relative to the others so as to desynchronize spectral information across the frequency axis. Human listeners are remarkably tolerant of cross-channel spectral asynchrony induced in this fashion. Speech intelligibility remains relatively unimpaired until the average asynchrony spans three or more phonetic segments. Such perceptual robustness is correlated with the magnitude of the low-frequency (3-6 Hz) modulation spectrum and thus highlights the importance of syllabic segmentation and analysis for robust processing of spoken language. High-frequency channels (>1.5 kHz) play a particularly important role when the spectral asynchrony is sufficiently large as to significantly reduce the power in the low-frequency modulation spectrum (analogous to acoustic reverberation) and may thereby account for the deterioration of speech intelligibility among the hearing impaired under conditions of acoustic interference (such as background noise and reverberation) characteristic of the real world.