Many studies have shown the advantage of using ideal binary masking (IdBM) to improve the intelligibility of speech corrupted by interfering maskers. Given the fact that amplitude and phase are two important acoustic cues for speech perception, the present work further investigated the relative contributions of these two cues to the intelligibility advantage of IdBM-processed sentences. Three t...

Increasing the number of channels at low frequencies improves discrimination of fundamental frequency (F0) in cochlear implants (Geurts, L., Wouters, J., 2004. Better place-coding of the fundamental frequency in cochlear implants. J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 115 (2), 844-852). We conducted three experiments to test whether improved F0 discrimination can be translated into increased speech intelligibili...

In a collaborative research project, several monaural and binaural noise reduction algorithms have been comprehensively evaluated. In this article, eight selected noise reduction algorithms were assessed using instrumental measures, with a focus on the instrumental evaluation of speech intelligibility. Four distinct, reverberant scenarios were created to reflect everyday listening situations: a...

A growing body of experimental research suggests that speech supplementation strategies can markedly increase speech intelligibility for individuals with dysarthria (D. Beukelman & K. Yorkston, 1977; E. Crow & P. Enderby, 1989; L. Hunter, T. Pring, & S. Martin, 1991; K. C. Hustad & D. R. Beukelman, 2001). However, studies in which speech supplementation strategies were actually implemented by s...

Impairment of the phonological system is one of the most common communication disorders of young children. In 1971, Milisen estimated that functional articulation disorders make up 75 to 80% of all speech impairments in children. Seventeen years later, the National Institute of Neurological and Communicative Disorders and Stroke concluded that 10 to 15% of all preschoolers had a speech disorder...

Speech intelligibility is the very essence of communications. When high noise can degrade a speech signal to the threshold of intelligibility, for example in mobile and military applications, introducing further degradation by a speech coder could prove critical. This paper investigates concepts towards a new speech coder that draws upon the field of image processing in a new multimedia approac...

A new set of ‘‘Familiarity-controlled word lists 2003” (FW03) has been developed for a spoken-word intelligibility test in Japanese. FW03 consists of 20 lists of 50 words in four word-familiarity ranks (i.e., 4000 words in total). The entropy of (a) initial moras and (b) sequences consisting of a vowel and a following consonant was maximized in the word lists within each word-familiarity rank. ...

In mobile devices, perceived speech signal degrades significantly in the presence of background noise as it reaches directly at the listener's ears. There is a need to improve the intelligibility and quality of the received speech signal in noisy environments by incorporating speech enhancement algorithms. This paper focuses on speech enhancement method including auditory masking propertie...

In order to predict which words in a sentence are harder to understand in noise it is necessary to consider not only audibility but also semantic or linguistic information. This paper focuses on using linguistic predictability to inform an intelligibility enhancement method that uses Lombard-adapted synthetic speech to modify low predictable words in Speech Perception in Noise (SPIN) test sente...

We have previously proposed a statistical method for estimating the pronunciation proficiency and intelligibility of presentations made in English by non-native speakers. To investigate the relationship between various acoustic measures and the pronunciation score and intelligibility, we statistically analyzed the speaker’s actual utterances to find combinations of acoustic features with a high...