Recent evidence suggests that spectral change, as measured by cochlea-scaled entropy (CSE), predicts speech intelligibility better than the information carried by vowels or consonants in sentences. Motivated by this finding, the present study investigates whether intelligibility indices implemented to include segments marked with significant spectral change better predict speech intelligibility...

OBJECTIVES The purpose of this study is to evaluate the performance of a number of speech intelligibility indices in terms of predicting the intelligibility of vocoded speech. DESIGN Noise-corrupted sentences were vocoded in a total of 80 conditions, involving three different signal-to-noise ratio levels (-5, 0, and 5 dB) and two types of maskers (steady state noise and two-talker). Tone-voco...

Mand training is an essential component of verbal behavior training for any individual who lacks this skill. The current study replicates and extends, with some procedural differences, the work of Hall and Sundberg (1987) by using an interrupted chain procedure to teach mands for missing items to children with autism. The participants were 3 children with autism, ranging between 5 and 8 years o...

Exposure to modified speech has been shown to benefit children with language-learning impairments with respect to their language skills (M. M. Merzenich et al., 1998; P. Tallal et al., 1996). In the study by Tallal and colleagues, the speech modification consisted of both slowing down and amplifying fast, transitional elements of speech. In this study, we examined whether the benefits of modifi...

This study investigated the perceptual contributions of vowels and consonants to Mandarin sentence intelligibility. Mandarin sentences were edited using a noise-replacement paradigm to preserve various amounts of segmental information and presented to normal-hearing listeners to recognize. The vowel-only Mandarin sentences yielded a remarkable 3:1 intelligibility advantage over the consonant-on...

A study is presented on how well objective measures of speech quality and intelligibility can predict the subjective intelligibility of speech that has undergone spectral envelope smoothing and simplification of its excitation. Speech modifications are made by resynthesising speech that has been spectrally smoothed. Objective measures are applied to the modified speech and include measures of s...

This paper deals with the problem of predicting the average intelligibility of noisy and potentially processed speech signals, as observed by a group of normal hearing listeners. We propose a prediction model based on the hypothesis that intelligibility is monotonically related to the the amount of Shannon information the critical-band amplitude envelopes of the noisy/processed signal convey ab...

This paper addresses the study of the speech intelligibility enhancement. The speech model, noise sources, perceptual aspects of speech, and performance evaluation are reviewed. The intelligibility enhancement system based on spectral subtraction technique is investigated. Spectral density estimation device based on the algorithm of smoothed periodograms is analysed. Determination of the silenc...

We present a general framework for addressing the problem of semantic intelligibility among artificial agents based on concepts integral to the case-based reasoning research program. For this purpose, we define case-based semiotics (CBS) (based on the well known notion of the semiotic triangle) as the model that defines semantic intelligibility. We show how traditional CBR notions like transfor...