Investigation of the relative perceptual importance of temporal envelope and temporal fine structure between tonal and non-tonal languages
نویسندگان
چکیده
In this paper, we investigate the relative perceptual importance of the temporal envelop (TE) and temporal fine structure (TFS) between tonal language and non-tonal language perception. The “auditory chimera” experiment is conducted on both American English and Mandarin Chinese with the same conditions. Our experimental results show that there is no significant perceptual difference of TE and TFS between Mandarin Chinese and American English when the interference noise is speech-shaped noise. However, there is a distinct relative perceptual importance difference when the interference noise is a competing speech. The results also show that speech perception in Mandarin Chinese language is more sensitive to TFS distortion than is American English. In addition, with fewer auditory channels (one or two bands), speech perception in American English is more sensitive to TE distortion compared to Mandarin Chinese. Finally, the related discussions are made according to the perceptual difference between tonal language and non-tonal language regarding the speech signal processing strategies.
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