PURPOSE To determine the mechanisms of speech intelligibility impairment due to neurologic impairments, intelligibility decline was modeled as a function of co-occurring changes in the articulatory, resonatory, phonatory, and respiratory subsystems. METHOD Sixty-six individuals diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) were studied longitudinally. The disease-related changes in artic...

Speech intelligibility can be severely compromised in environments where there are several competing speakers. It may be possible, however, to improve speech intelligibility in such environments by manipulating certain acoustic parameters known to facilitate the segregation of competing signals. The first step in designing such a feature-rich audio display is to understand the significant eleme...

Speech output, whether live, recorded or synthetic, is often employed in difficult listening conditions. Context-sensitive speech modifications aim to promote intelligibility while maintaining quality and listener comfort. The current study used objective measures of intelligibility and quality to compare five energy reallocation strategies operating under equal energy and preserved duration co...

Speech quality significantly affects the performance of speech dependent systems. Noise in background lowers clarity and intelligibility speech. The augmentation can increase its quality. We propose a single-channel improvement framework that combines particle swarm optimization (PSO), gravitational search algorithm (GSA), harmonic regeneration noise reduction (HRNR) to minimize signal intellig...

A speech corpus is available in Romanian to use as the common material in speech perception and automatic speech recognition. It consists of high-quality audio of 400 sentences spoken by each of 12 speakers. Utterances are simple, syntactically identical phrases such as “muta bronz cu p 2 agale.” Preliminary intelligibility tests using the audio signals suggest that the collected speech is easi...

Cross-lingual voice conversion (XVC) transforms the speaker identity of a source to that target who speaks different language. Due intrinsic differences between languages, converted speech may carry an unwanted foreign accent. In this paper, we first investigate intelligibility and confirm performance degradation caused by accent/intelligibility issue. With goal generating native-sounding speec...