In this paper, we study human perception of consonants in the presence of additive babble noise at two speaking rates. In addition, we work on a model that attempts to replicate these human results through a phoneme recognition model. Consonant-Vowel-Consonant (CVC) stimuli comprising of a set of 13 consonants and 3 vowels (/a/, /i/, /u/) were recorded in a sound proof booth by two talkers at t...

This investigation examined the reliability of the Synthetic Sentence Identification (SSI) test. An adaptive procedure was used to assess speech recognition thresholds (SRTs) for the SSI lists over two separate test sessions. The commercially available Davy Crockett passage and a multitalker babble were used as competition. Subjects consisted of 20 adults with normal hearing sensitivity. Result...

Our research aims at exploring the nature of the interferences that occur during the speech-in-speech situation. French target words were inserted in 2 types of backgrounds: (i) 4-talker babble spoken in various languages such as French, Italian or Irish, containing acoustic and linguistic information, (ii) fluctuating noise derived from each 4-talker babble signal, with only acoustic informati...

This study proposes an effective noise estimation method for robust speech recognition in time-varying noise conditions. The proposed noise estimation scheme employs the Variation Model Composition (VMC) method, where multiple noise models are generated by selectively applying perturbation factors to the mean parameters of a basis noise model. The noise estimate is obtained by using the posteri...

Can we model speech recognition in noise by exploring higher order statistics of the combined signal? How will changes in these statistics affect speech perception in noise? This study addresses these questions in two experiments. One investigated the relationship between an established ”glimpsing” model and the fourth order statistic, kurtosis. The glimpsing model [1] proposes that listeners c...

Can we model speech recognition in noise by exploring higher order statistics of the combined signal? How will changes in these statistics affect speech perception in noise? This study addresses these questions in two experiments. One investigated the relationship between an established ”glimpsing” model and the fourth order statistic, kurtosis. The glimpsing model [1] proposes that listeners c...

A new noise reduction algorithm is proposed for cochlear implants that applies attenuation to the noisy envelopes inversely proportional to the estimated signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) in each channel. The performance of the proposed noise reduction algorithm is evaluated with nine Clarion CII cochlear implant patients using IEEE sentences embedded in multi-talker babble and speech-shaped noise at...

This study investigated whether speech produced in spontaneous interactions when addressing a talker experiencing actual challenging conditions differs in acoustic-phonetic characteristics from speech produced (a) with communicative intent under more ideal conditions and (b) without communicative intent under imaginary challenging conditions (read, clear speech). It also investigated whether ac...

When people interact, they fall into synchrony. This synchrony has been demonstrated in a range of contexts, from walking or playing music together to holding conversation, and linked prosocial outcomes such as development rapport efficiency cooperation. While the basis remains unclear, several studies have found increase when an interaction is made challenging, potentially providing means faci...

In this paper, a voice activity detector (VAD) for variable rate speech coding is decomposed into two parts, a decision rule and a background noise statistic estimator, which are analysed separately by applying a statistical model. A robust decision rule is derived from the generalized likelihood ratio test by assuming that the noise statistics are known a priori. To estimate the time-varying n...