This paper presents results concerning the exploitation of visual cues in the perception of Mandarin tones. The lower part of a female speaker's face was recorded on digital video as she uttered 25 sets of syllabic tokens covering the four different tones of Mandarin. Then in a perception study the audio sound track alone, as well an audio plus video condition were presented to native Mandarin ...

This paper presents a novel technique that allows testing spoken dialogue systems by means of an automatic generation of conversations. The technique permits to easily test spoken dialogue systems under a variety of lab-simulated conditions, as it is easy to vary or change the utterance corpus used to check the performance of the system. The technique is based on the use of a module called user...

This paper discusses tone perception in Vietnamese under audio only and audio plus video conditions. The lower part of a male speaker's face was recorded on digital video as he uttered 22 sets of syllabic tokens covering the six different tones of Vietnamese. In a perception study the audio signal alone, as well as audio plus video conditions were presented to native Vietnamese speakers who wer...

This project was motivated by the need for improved speech recognition in noise, and by expectation that auditory model front ends could make recognition more robust to noise, microphone variation, and speaking style. The project began in FY91 with the initial goal of implementing, evaluating, and comparing four promising auditory front ends: (1) the mean-rate and synchrony outputs of S. Seneff...

This study evaluates the perceptual effects of single-microphone noise reduction in hearing aids. Twenty subjects with moderate sensorineural hearing loss listened to speech in babble noise processed via noise reduction from three different linearly fitted hearing aids. Subjects performed (a) speech-intelligibility tests, (b) listening-effort ratings, and (c) paired-comparison ratings on noise ...

This study investigates speech comprehension in competing multi-talker babble. We examined the effects of number of simultaneous talkers and of frequency of words in the babble on lexical decision to target words. Results revealed better performance at a low talker number (n = 2). Importantly, frequency of words in the babble significantly affected performance: high frequency word babble interf...

This paper investigates to what extent users of bilateral and bimodal fittings should expect to benefit from all three different binaural advantages found to be present in normal-hearing listeners. Head-shadow and binaural squelch are advantages occurring under spatially separated speech and noise, while summation emerges when speech and noise coincide in space. For 14 bilateral or bimodal list...