There is a subgroup of elderly listeners with hearing loss who can be characterized by exceptionally poor speech understanding. This study examined the hypothesis that the poor speech-understanding performance of some elderly listeners is associated with disproportionate deficits in temporal resolution and frequency resolution, especially for complex signals. Temporal resolution, as measured by...

A possibility to use the formant features (FF) in the user-dependent isolated word recognition has been investigated. The word recognition was performed using a dynamic time-warping technique. Several methods of the formant feature extraction were compared and a method based on the singular prediction polynomials has been proposed for the recognition of isolated words. Recognition performance o...

Two methods of spectral analysis for noisy speech recognition are proposed and tested in a speaker independent word recognition experiment under an additive white Gaussian noise environment. One is Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCC) spectral analysis on the autocorrelation sequence of the speech signal and the other is MFCC spectral analysis on its double autocorrelation sequence. The w...

In this paper, we present the results that our n-gram based word string language model, combined with speaker and noise adaptation of the acoustic model, improves recognition performance of noisy broadcast news speech. The focus was brought into a remedy against recognition errors of short words. The word string language models based on POS and n-gram frequency reduced deletion errors by 17%, i...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES People usually converse in real-life background noise. They experience more difficulty understanding speech in noise than in a quiet environment. The present study investigated how speech recognition in real-life background noise is affected by the type of noise, signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), and age. SUBJECTS AND METHODS Eighteen young adults and fifteen middle-aged ...

Elderly listeners, as a group, do not perform as well as younger listeners on tests of word recognition, particularly in the presence of competing noise. It has been suggested that elderly listeners may be less willing to guess at items when they are unsure of the correct response, and as a result omit more responses. Omitting responses on word recognition tests may deflate word recognition sco...

In this paper, we propose a novel method of normalizing the voice quality in an utterance for both clean speech and speech contaminated by noise. The normalization method is applied to the N-best hypotheses from an HMM-based classifier, then an SM (Sub-space Method)-based verifier tests the hypotheses after normalizing the monophone scores together with the HMMbased likelihood score. The HMM-SM...

89 S peech recognition seems like an attractive input mechanism for wear-able computers, and as we saw in this magazine's first issue, several companies are promoting products that use limited speech interfaces for specific tasks. However , we must overcome several challenges to using speech recognition in more general contexts, and interface designers must be wary of applying the technology to...