Two talkers' productions of the same phoneme may be quite different acoustically, whereas their productions of different speech sounds may be virtually identical. Despite this lack of invariance in the relationship between the speech signal and linguistic categories, listeners experience phonetic constancy across a wide range of talkers, speaking styles, linguistic contexts, and acoustic enviro...

Talker intelligibility and perceptual adaptation under cochlear implant (CI)-simulation and speech in multi-talker babble were compared. The stimuli consisted of 100 sentences produced by 20 native English talkers. The sentences were processed to simulate listening with an eight-channel CI or were mixed with multi-talker babble. Stimuli were presented to 400 listeners in a sentence transcriptio...

When a target voice is masked by an increasingly similar masker voice, increases in energetic masking are likely to occur due to increased spectro-temporal overlap in the competing speech waveforms. However, the impact of this increase may be obscured by informational masking effects related to the increased confusability of the target and masking utterances. In this study, the effects of targe...

Recent work demonstrates that listeners utilize talker-specific information in the speech signal to inform real-time language processing. However, there are multiple representational levels at which this may take place. Listeners might use acoustic cues in the speech signal to access the talker’s identity and information about what they tend to talk about, which then immediately constrains proc...

When discriminating between spoken samples of unknown foreign languages, infants, young children and adult listeners are able to make same-language/different-language judgments at better than chance levels. Adults can even discriminate between languages when they are produced by the same bilingual talkers. That is, listeners are able to separate talker from language characteristics. One questio...

This paper describes the Buckeye corpus of spontaneous American English speech, a 307,000-word corpus containing the speech of 40 talkers from central Ohio, USA. The method used to elicit and record the speech is described, followed by a description of the protocol that was developed to phonemically label what talkers said. The results of a test of labeling consistency are then presented. The c...

Auditory spatial perception plays a critical role in day-to-day communication. For instance, listeners utilize acoustic spatial information to segregate individual talkers into distinct auditory "streams" to improve speech intelligibility. However, spatial localization is an exceedingly difficult task in everyday listening environments with numerous distracting echoes from nearby surfaces, such...

Recent evidence from experiments using sinewave speech shows that the linguistic content of a message, as well as the indexical characteristics of the talker can be perceived from the isolated kinematic form of speech utterances. Similarly, isolated visual kinematic information in the form of point-light displays has been shown to behave in much the same way that full visual displays of a talke...

Three experiments studied the perception of speech produced by female twins (5 MZ, 1 DZ) ranging in age from 20 to 67. The experiments were designed to discover whether listeners could detect differences between twins, and to explore listeners’ perceptual representations of talkers. Because identical twins have virtually identical vocal tracts and the twins in this study grew up together in the...

In this paper, a study is made on selecting existing acoustic models that are trained from native English speech for improving recognition of nonnative English talkers’ speech. The problem is addressed from the perspective that foreign accents prevent detailed triphone models that are commonly used in highperformance speech recognition systems to match well with these talkers’ speech, and there...