Noise has an effect on speech production. Stationary noise and babble have been used in the past but the effect of a competing talker, which might be expected to cause different types of disruption, has rarely been investigated. The current study examined the acoustic and phonetic consequences of N-talker noise on sentence production for a range of values of N from 1 (competing talker) to infin...

• Signal to noise ratio alone cannot represent speech quality. Speech quality perception is different in acoustic and electrical hearing. Cochlear implant users prefer softer conversational level sound. Normal hearing listeners higher are less sensitive distorted speech. Electrical by cochlear implants (CIs) may be fundamentally from the normal-hearing (NH) listeners, presumably showing unequal...

This paper presents a comparative performance study of several time domain features for voiced/non-voiced classification of speech. Five classification schemes have been developed by combining one or two features amongst: Energy (E), Zeros Crossing Rate (ZCR), Autocorrelation Function (ACF), Average Magnitude Difference Function (AMDF), Weighted ACF (WACF), and the Discrete Wavelet Transform (D...

This study examined infants' abilities to separate speech from different talkers and to recognize a familiar word (the infant's own name) in the context of noise. In 4 experiments, infants heard repetitions of either their names or unfamiliar names in the presence of background babble. Five-month-old infants listened longer to their names when the target voice was 10 dB, but not 5 dB, more inte...

We compare automatic recognition with human perception of audio-visual speech, in the large-vocabulary, continuous speech recognition (LVCSR) domain. Specifically, we study the benefit of the visual modality for both machines and humans, when combined with audio degraded by speech-babble noise at various signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs). We first consider an automatic speechreading system with a p...

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...

Recognizing speech in adverse listening conditions is a significant cognitive, perceptual, and linguistic challenge, especially for children. Prior studies have yielded mixed results on the impact of bilingualism on speech perception in noise. Methodological variations across studies make it difficult to converge on a conclusion regarding the effect of bilingualism on speech-in-noise performanc...

Multi-task learning (MTL) involves the simultaneous training of two or more related tasks over shared representations. In this work, we apply MTL to audio-visual automatic speech recognition(AV-ASR). Our primary task is to learn a mapping between audio-visual fused features and frame labels obtained from acoustic GMM/HMM model. This is combined with an auxiliary task which maps visual features ...

The present study examined the impact of talker variation in the target or background speech streams on speech-in-speech recognition. Listeners transcribed sentences in single-talker background babble at two signal-to-noise ratios in one of three conditions: 1) variable target talker and consistent masker talker, 2) consistent target talker and variable masker talker, or 3) consistent target an...