In many speech communication applications it is of great interest to achieve a high intelligibility to ensure good communication. However, in these applications speech is often disturbed by additive noise and/or reverberation. Therefore, it is desirable to develop algorithms that are able to maintain a high intelligibility in such disturbed scenarios. While amplifying the speech to achieve good...

In this paper, speech intelligibility is enhanced by manipulating the modulation spectrum of the signal. First, the signal is decomposed into Amplitude Modulation (AM) and Frequency Modulation (FM) components using a high resolution adaptive quasi-harmonic model of speech. Then, the AM part of midrange frequencies of speech spectrum is modified by applying a transforming function which follows ...

Clear speech has been shown to have an intelligibility advantage over casual speech in noisy and reverberant environments. This work validates spectral and time domain modifications to increase the intelligibility of casual speech in reverberant environments by compensating particular differences between the two speaking styles. To compensate spectral differences, a frequency-domain filtering a...

This paper introduces a three-dimensional virtual head for use in speech tutoring applications. The system achieves audiovisual speech synthesis using viseme-driven animation and a coarticulation model, to automatically generate speech from text. The talking head was evaluated using a modified rhyme test for intelligibility. The audiovisual speech animation was found to give higher intelligibil...

The relationship between speech intelligibility of eleven prelingually deaf children and their residual hearing capabilities was investigated. Audio recordings were made of the deaf children, ranging from eleven to seventeen years of age, when they read so-called Helen-questions. Tapes containing the Helen-questions were played to inexperienced and experienced normally hearing listeners to meas...

Most noise reduction algorithms rely on obtaining reliable estimates of the SNR of each frequency bin. For that reason, much work has been done in analyzing the behavior and performance of SNR estimation algorithms in the context of improving speech quality and reducing speech distortions (e.g., musical noise). Comparatively little work has been reported, however, regarding the analysis and inv...

Speech cannot be understood if it cannot be heard. Therefore, audibility is undoubtedly a major goal of amplification for children and adults with hearing loss. In restoring audibility, it is often assumed that the listener can extract speech cues over the entire range of speech frequencies. This assumption is true for a person with mild to moderate hearing losses, but is not true when hearing ...