This study investigates masking effects occurring during speech comprehension in the presence of concurrent speech signals. We examined the differential effects of acoustic–phonetic and lexical content of 4to 8-talker babble (natural speech) or babble-like noise (reversed speech) on word identification. Behavioral results show a monotonic decrease in speech comprehension rates with an increasin...

Speech signals are often degraded by additive interference over single channel communication systems. For stationary and well deened noise sources, eeective solutions exist. However, it is often diicult to formulate a model for non-stationary and speech-like noise sources such as cross-talk or multi-speaker babble, which exist in real scenarios. In this paper, we propose a solution to this prob...

Spoken communication in a non-native language is especially difficult in the presence of noise. This study compared English and Spanish listeners' perceptions of English intervocalic consonants as a function of masker type. Three maskers (stationary noise, multitalker babble, and competing speech) provided varying amounts of energetic and informational masking. Competing English and Spanish spe...

In this paper we explore how to improve a sparse coding (SC) strategy that was successfully used to improve subjective speech perception in noisy environment in cochlear implants. On the basis of the existing unsupervised algorithm, we developed an enhanced supervised SC strategy, using the SC shrinkage (SCS) principle. The new algorithm is implemented at the stage of the spectral envelopes aft...

This study investigates the effect of different types of clear speech on cross-linguistic perception. In particular, it examines whether the words produced to help L2 interlocutors are perceived more easily by them than the words produced for L1 interlocutors to counteract speech babble noise. English keywords in these conditions are extracted from the LUCID corpus, and they are presented to Ja...

Speech perception in noise is still difficult for cochlear implant (CI) users even with many years of CI use. This study aimed to investigate neurophysiological and behavioral foundations for CI-dependent speech perception in noise. Seventeen post-lingual CI users and twelve age-matched normal hearing adults participated in two experiments. In Experiment 1, CI users' auditory-only word percepti...

This paper describes a speech-in-noise test which is suitable for testing both human and machine speech recognition in noise. The test uses spoken digit triplets, presented in a range of babble backgrounds and signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs). The performance of a normal hearing (NH) and hearing impaired (HI) listener have been assessed using the test. Both listeners show a fall in performance wit...

Almost half of the population with multiple sclerosis (MS) complains of difficulty hearing, despite having essentially normal pure-tone thresholds. The purpose of the present investigation was to evaluate the effects of frequency-modulation (FM) technology utilization on speech perception in noise for adults with and without MS. Sentence material was presented at a constant level of 65 dBA Leq ...