Previous work has shown that masked-sentence recognition is particularly poor when the masker is composed of two competing talkers, a finding that is attributed to informational masking. Informational masking tends to be largest when the target and masker talkers are perceptually similar. Reductions in masking have been observed for a wide range of target and masker differences, including langu...

Perceptual representations of phonemes are flexible and adapt rapidly to accommodate idiosyncratic articulation in the speech of a particular talker. This letter addresses whether such adjustments remain stable over time and under exposure to other talkers. During exposure to a story, listeners learned to interpret an ambiguous sound as f or s . Perceptual adjustments measured after 12 h were a...

Speech perception flexibly adapts to short-term regularities of the ambient speech input. Recent research demonstrates that the function of an acoustic dimension for speech categorization at a given time is relative to its relationship to the evolving distribution of dimensional regularity across time, and not simply to its fixed value along the dimension. Two studies examine the nature of this...

This study investigates the capacity for targeted hyperarticulation of contextually-relevant contrasts. Participants communicated target words with final /s/ or /z/ when a voicing minimal-pair (e.g., target dose, minimal-pair doze) either was or was not available as an alternative in the context. The results indicate that talkers enhance the durational cues associated with the word-final voicin...

There has recently been increasing interest in the idea of enhancing speech recognition by the use of visual information derived from the face of the talker. This paper demonstrates the use of nonlinear image decomposition, in the form of a ‘sieve’, applied to the task of visual speech recognition. Information derived from the mouth region is used in visual and audiovisual speech recognition of...

This study investigates the perception of English words produced by 45 native talkers presented in moderate noise to native Norwegian listeners. The relative intelligibility of individual talkers is compared with that obtained for native listeners in order to determine whether inherent talker clarity is determined by global acoustic-phonetic characteristics. Talker intelligibility was strongly ...

This paper defines talker characterization problem and contrasts it to the related problems of talker verification and identification. The requirement is to automatically separate and tag talkers in a conference environment using a microphone array and unconstrained speech. An approach which uses a continuous ergodic HMM organized over broad phonemic categories using non-parametric observation ...

This experiment extended work done previously in our laboratory to develop a method to elicit from talkers three different speaking styles, reduced, citation, and hyperarticulated, using controlled materials in a laboratory setting. In the initial experiment, the reduced style was elicited by having subjects read a sentence while carrying out a distractor task that involved recalling a fixed nu...

PURPOSE The purpose of this study was to investigate how linguistic knowledge interacts with indexical knowledge in older children's perception under demanding listening conditions created by extensive talker variability. METHOD Twenty-five 9- to 12-year-old children, 12 from North Carolina (NC) and 13 from Wisconsin (WI), identified 12 vowels in isolated /hVd/ words produced by 120 talkers rep...

Speech communication becomes increasingly difficult with age, especially in adverse listening conditions. We compared speech adaptations made by ‘older adult’ (65-84 years) and ‘younger adult’ (19-26 years) talkers when speech is produced with communicative intent. The aim was to investigate how articulation rate is affected by the type of adverse listening condition and by the change in task d...