The purpose of this experiment was to determine the relationship between psychometric functions for words presented in multitalker babble using a descending presentation level protocol and a random presentation level protocol. Forty veterans (mean = 63.5 years) with mild-to-moderate sensorineural hearing losses were enrolled. Seventy of the Northwestern University Auditory Test No. 6 words spok...

OBJECTIVE To develop a corpus of sentences in babble noise that is suitable for Mandarin-speaking children. Two experiments were conducted with specific aims of (1) developing sentence material that is grammatically and semantically within the linguistic abilities of children; and (2) improving the efficiency of the test by equalizing the relative intelligibility of individual items in sentence...

Different methods of extracting speech features from an auditory model were systematically investigated in terms of their robustness to different noises. The methods either computed the average firing rate within frequency channels (spectral features) or inter-spike-intervals (timing features) from the simulated auditory nerve response. When used as the front-end for an automatic speech recogni...

The effects of two types of auditory distracters (steady-state noise vs. four-talker babble) on visual-only speechreading accuracy were tested against a baseline (silence) in 23 participants with above-average speechreading ability. Their task was to speechread high frequency Swedish words. They were asked to rate their own performance and effort, and report how distracting each type of auditor...

This paper presents a new method for testing dialogue systems using a variety of real-world conditions simulated in lab. The method is based on the use of an additional dialogue system, called simulator, designed to behave as users interacting with the dialogue system to test. The behavior of the simulator is decided from diverse scenarios that represent user goals. The simulator tries to achie...

Abstract Voice-activated commands have become a key feature of popular devices such as smartphones, home assistants, and wearables. For convenience, many people configure their to be ‘always on’ listening for voice from the user using trigger phrase “Hey Siri,” “Okay Google,” or “Alexa.” However, false positives these triggers often result in privacy violations with conversations being inadvert...

The capability of speech understanding can be tested in the form of sentences. This report describes the origin of a new test in the Czech language to evaluate the sentence intelligibility with the presence of the competitive disturb noise. The results of the test depend on the test project, sentence material, competitive signal, test evaluation, and hearing conditions. Pilot results were obtai...

The performance of voice dialling systems often degrades rapidly as the intensity of the background noise increases. In this paper, we describe a neural network based speech enhancement technique for improving the speech recognition performance of a voice dialling system in very noisy real world type conditions. The speech samples were recorded in laboratory conditions and afterwards corrupted ...

In cochlear implants, limited spectral and temporal information is provided. Previous studies argued for different effects of temporal information on speech identification in adverse environments. Particularly, it is unclear how speech intelligibility is influenced by the low-pass cutoff frequency of temporal envelope extractors in noise. The current study explored this issue with Mandarin nois...

A novel Statistical Approach for F0 Estimation, SAFE, is proposed to improve the accuracy of F0 tracking under both clean and additive noise conditions. Prominent Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) peaks in speech spectra are robust information source from which F0 can be inferred. A probabilistic framework is proposed to model the effect of additive noise on voiced speech spectra. It is observed that...