BACKGROUND contextual cues intrinsic to speech stimuli can have an influence on speech intelligibility measurements; however, the influence of cues that depend on the acoustic signal, such as speech rate and vocal loudness, need further investigation. AIM to examine whether possible reductions in the articulatory rate and increase in vocal loudness, associated to the production of different s...

“Clear” (CLR) speech is a speaking style that speakers adopt to be understood correctly in a difficult communication environment. Studies have shown that CLR speech, as opposed to “conversational” (CNV) speech, has significantly higher intelligibility in various conditions. While many differences in acoustic features have been identified, it is not known which individual feature or combinations...

BACKGROUND Up to 89% of the individuals with Parkinson's disease (PD) experience speech problem over the course of the disease. Speech prosody and intelligibility are two of the most affected areas in hypokinetic dysarthria. However, assessment of these areas could potentially be problematic as speech prosody and intelligibility could be affected by the type of speech materials employed. OBJE...

The alteration in the pitch of speech produced by breathing helium mixtures suggests the possibility of increased intelligibility of such speech by selective frequency filtering. This study evaluated speech, spoken after breathing an 80 % — 20 % mixture which was combined with broadband noise and then passed through a selection of bandpass filters. Results indicate that while intelligibility di...

The objective intelligibility assessment of nonlinearly enhanced speech is a widely experienced problem. Nonlinear speech enhancement processors operate primarily on the low-level and transient components of speech. As these sections contain important acoustic cues as well as context-constitutive information, they dominate speech intelligibility. For that reason, shorttime intelligibility measu...

One way talkers can increase intelligibility is by producing clear speech. Though clear speech, as opposed to conversational speech (ConvS), generally increases intelligibility (known as the clear speech intelligibility benefit), not all talkers exhibit the same degree of benefit. Ferguson showed that while intelligibility increased across talkers for clear speech, when looking at individual ta...

Intelligibility of conversationally produced speech for normal hearing listeners was studied for three male and three female talkers. Four typical listening environments were used. These simulated a quiet living room, a classroom, and social events in two settings with different reverberation characteristics. For each talker, overall intelligibility and intelligibility for vowels, consonant voi...