Speech therapy aiming at improving voice quality and speech intelligibility is often hampered by the lack of knowledge of the underlying deficits. One way to help speech therapists treating patients would be to supply synthetic benchmarks for pathological speech. These can be used to train therapists and evaluate and interpret automatic speech recognizers used for diagnosing pathological speech...

Objective assessment of synthetic speech intelligibility can be a useful tool for the development of text-to-speech (TTS) systems, as it provides a reproducible and inexpensive alternative to subjective listening tests. In a recent work, it was shown that the intelligibility of synthetic speech could be assessed objectively by comparing two sequences of phoneme class conditional probabilities, ...

In many cases the intelligibility of speech in noise may be assumed independent of the absolute sound level; the speech-to-noise ratio (SNR) primarily determines intelligibility. However, at high sound levels, speech intelligibility is found to decrease. Subjective Speech Reception Threshold (SRT) measurements were performed at various speech and noise levels, and with various noise spectra. De...

Speech intelligibility of two types of vocoders was measured using the modified rhyme test. One type of vocoder, a continuous variable slope delta (CVSD), was a waveform encoder. The other type, an advanced multi-band excitation (AMBE), was a parametric encoder. In the first experiment, clear speech was processed through the vocoders. Intelligibility was measured in a control condition, i.e. wi...

In mobile devices, perceived speech signal degrades significantly in the presence of background noise as it reaches directly at the listener's ears. There is a need to improve the intelligibility and quality of the received speech signal in noisy environments by incorporating speech enhancement algorithms. This paper focuses on speech enhancement method including auditory masking propertie...

In mobile devices, perceived speech signal degrades significantly in the presence of background noise as it reaches directly at the listener's ears. There is a need to improve the intelligibility and quality of the received speech signal in noisy environments by incorporating speech enhancement algorithms. This paper focuses on speech enhancement method including auditory masking propertie...

This report describes a method of speech modification to improve the intelligibility of speech. The spectral energy is reallocated by maintaining and emphasizing acoustical features important for speech perception. The method consists of three components: flattening of the spectral tilt, enhancement of the spectral contrast, and holding of the low-frequency region. The results of this speech in...

Intelligibility of speech in adverse near-end noise conditions can be enhanced with post-processing. Recently, a postprocessing method based on statistical mapping of the spectral tilt of normal speech to that of Lombard speech was proposed. However, previous intelligibility improvement studies utilizing Lombard speech have mainly gathered data from read sentences which might result in a less p...

PURPOSE Speech acoustic characteristics of children with cerebral palsy (CP) were examined with a multiple speech subsystems approach; speech intelligibility was evaluated using a prediction model in which acoustic measures were selected to represent three speech subsystems. METHOD Nine acoustic variables reflecting different subsystems, and speech intelligibility, were measured in 22 childre...

Recent studies on binary masking techniques make the assumption that each time-frequency (T-F) unit contributes an equal amount to the overall intelligibility of speech. The present study demonstrated that the importance of each T-F unit to speech intelligibility varies in accordance with speech content. Specifically, T-F units are categorized into two classes, speech-present T-F units and spee...