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Hilkhuysen, Gaston. "Effects of noise reduction on speech intelligibility." Thesis, Aix-Marseille, 2017. http://www.theses.fr/2017AIXM0676/document.
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On perçoit souvent la parole en présence de bien d’autres sons. Parfois les interférences sonores atteignent des niveaux tellement élevés que la parole devient inintelligible. Les méthodes de renforcement de la parole tentent de réduire les bruits ambiants, mais on en sait très peu sur l’effet qu’elles produisent sur l’intelligibilité de la parole. Cette thèse explore les effets des méthodes de renforcement de la parole, aussi appelées algorithmes de suppression du bruit, sur la l’intelligibilité.Après une brève introduction sur les notions de renforcement de la parole et d’intelligibilité, on présente trois études qui abordent les effets de ces méthodes d’un point de vue empirique. On démontre que le résultat de la suppression du bruit tend à réduire l’intelligibilité et que cet effet est constant pour une grande variété de niveaux sonores. Quand on fait appel à des experts pour mettre en place un système commercial de suppression du bruit dans le but d’améliorer l’intelligibilité, ils proposent des réglages qui dégradent l’intelligibilité. Les profanes perçoivent bien une amélioration de l’intelligibilité qui résulte des méthodes de renforcement de la parole.Trois autres études subséquentes tentent de préciser les propriétés du signal, qui ont des effets sur l’intelligibilité et qui sont généré par les méthodes de renforcement de la parole. Des métriques physiques basées sur différentes propriétés du signal ont été utilisées pour estimer l’intelligibilité de la parole renforcée. La plupart de ces mesures fournissent des estimations peu fiables ou biaisées de l’intelligibilité absolueSpeech is often perceived in the presence of other sounds. At times the interfering sounds can reach such high levels that the speech becomes unintelligible. Speech enhancement methods attempt to reduce the audibility of noisy sounds, but little is known about how their influence on intelligibility. This thesis explores the effects of speech enhancement, also known as noise suppression algorithms, on speech intelligibility. After a short introduction to speech enhancement and intelligibility, three studies consider the effects from an empirical perspective. It is shown that noise suppression tends to reduce intelligibility and that its effect is mostly constant across a broad range of noise levels. When experts were asked to apply a commercial noise suppressor to optimise intelligibility, they proposed settings that degraded intelligibility. Laypeople successfully identified an increase in intelligibility resulting from speech enhancement. Three subsequent studies attempt to identify the signal properties responsible for the intelligibility effects and generated by speech enhancement.Physical metrics based on various signal properties were used to estimate the intelligibility of the speech-enhanced noisy signal. Most metrics provided unreliable or biased estimates of absolute intelligibility. Some could nevertheless be used to adjust speech enhancers such that intelligibility is optimal
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Kyong, J. S. "Speech intelligibility and hemispheric asymmetry." Thesis, University College London (University of London), 2009. http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/19001/.
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It is very rare, even in degraded listening environments, that we might confuse speech with a dog bark or vice versa, despite the fact that both are complex acoustic signals. Despite the solid assumption of left lateralisation in speech processing from clinical and anatomical observations, the results from brain imaging studies have been inconsistent. One possible cause for this controversy may come from the use of different imaging system. Using inadequate baselines, however, may bring more critical problem. In brain imaging studies, especially when cognitive subtraction is used, images of cognitive processes are generally derived by subtracting a control stimulus/task from an experimental counterpart. The two stimuli/tasks to be compared are expected to differ only in one factor/process and the difference in brain activations is thus considered to come from the particular difference between the two. This thus makes it difficult to find baseline stimuli/tasks that activate all but the process of interest. By far, spectrally rotated speech stands as a most satisfying control against intelligible speech as it is equally complex as speech but totally unintelligible. However, the spectral rotation so far has been a total rotation regardless of the source and the filter of sound, which are independent and heterogeneous by nature. A series of behavioural studies performed in this thesis showed that the source rotation did not significantly affect speech intelligibility whilst filter drastically decreased the intelligibility. Another possibility can be different brain imaging paradigms used. With carefully designed parametres using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we confirmed that intelligible speech recruited predominantly the left superior temporal area, replicating the results from previous positron emission tomography (PET) and fMRI studies. Since the intervention of scanner noise has been an issue in auditory research using an MRI system, four imaging paradigms were compared and it is concluded that a sparse sampling with 8 seconds of repetition time had a clear advantage over longer repetition time with 16 seconds and a continuous sampling. This paradigm was used in the study investigating the effects of channel number and presence/absence of tonal variation on speech intelligibility. Intelligibility increased together with increasing number of band channels and showed drastic improvement especially in the range of 2 – 6 numbers of frequency channel bands. A brain imaging study followed with mixed subtraction and parametric designs and revealed that the right superior temporal gyrus responded most when pitch variation was provided in the speech, regardless of intelligibility, unlike the pitch variation in non-speech (spectrally rotated speech here). Increasing intelligibility with increased spectral detail showed linear increase in percent signal change in hemodynamic response in the left superior temporal gyrus. The current result supports a streamed hierarchical model, in which speech comprehension occurs predominantly in the left hemisphere.
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Kitapci, Kivanc. "Speech intelligibility in multilingual spaces." Thesis, Heriot-Watt University, 2016. http://hdl.handle.net/10399/3157.
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This thesis examines speech intelligibility and multi-lingual communication, in terms of acoustics and perceptual factors. More specifically, the work focused on the impact of room acoustic conditions on the speech intelligibility of four languages representative of a wide range of linguistic properties (English, Polish, Arabic and Mandarin). Firstly, diagnostic rhyme tests (DRT), phonemically balanced (PB) word lists and phonemically balanced sentence lists have been compared under four room acoustic conditions defined by their speech transmission index (STI = 0.2, 0.4, 0.6 and 0.8). The results obtained indicated that there was a statistically significant difference between the word intelligibility scores of languages under all room acoustic conditions, apart from the STI = 0.8 condition. English was the most intelligible language under all conditions, and differences with other languages were larger when conditions were poor (maximum difference of 29% at STI = 0.2, 33% at STI = 0.4 and 14% at STI = 0.6). Results also showed that Arabic and Polish were particularly sensitive to background noise, and that Mandarin was significantly more intelligible than those languages at STI = 0.4. Consonant-to-vowel ratios and languages’ distinctive features and acoustical properties explained some of the scores obtained. Sentence intelligibility scores confirmed variations between languages, but these variations were statistically significant only at the STI = 0.4 condition (sentence tests being less sensitive to very good and very poor room acoustic conditions). Additionally, perceived speech intelligibility and soundscape perception associated to these languages was also analysed in three multi-lingual environments: an airport check-in area, a hospital reception area, and a café. Semantic differential analysis showed that perceived speech intelligibility of each language varies with the type of environment, as well as the type of background noise, reverberation time, and signal-to-noise ratio. Variations between the perceived speech intelligibility of the four languages were only marginally significant (p = 0.051), unlike objective intelligibility results. Perceived speech intelligibility of English appeared to be mostly affected negatively by the information content and distracting sounds present in the background noise. Lastly, the study investigated several standards and design guidelines and showed how adjustments could be made to recommended STI values in order to achieve consistent speech intelligibility ratings across languages.
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Liu, Wei Ming. "Objective assessment of speech intelligibility." Thesis, Swansea University, 2008. https://cronfa.swan.ac.uk/Record/cronfa42738.
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This thesis addresses the topic of objective speech intelligibility assessment. Speech intelligibility is becoming an important issue due most possibly to the rapid growth in digital communication systems in recent decades; as well as the increasing demand for security-based applications where intelligibility, rather than the overall quality, is the priority. Afterall, the loss of intelligibility means that communication does not exist. This research sets out to investigate the potential of automatic speech recognition (ASR) in intelligibility assessment, the motivation being the obvious link between word recognition and intelligibility. As a pre-cursor, quality measures are first considered since intelligibility is an attribute encompassed in overall quality. Here, 9 prominent quality measures including the state-of-the-art Perceptual Evaluation of Speech Quality (PESQ) are assessed. A large range of degradations are considered including additive noise and those introduced by coding and enhancement schemes. Experimental results show that apart from Weighted Spectral Slope (WSS), generally the quality scores from all other quality measures considered here correlate poorly with intelligibility. Poor correlations are observed especially when dealing with speech-like noises and degradations introduced by enhancement processes. ASR is then considered where various word recognition statistics, namely word accuracy, percentage correct, deletion, substitution and insertion are assessed as potential intelligibility measure. One critical contribution is the observation that there are links between different ASR statistics and different forms of degradation. Such links enable suitable statistics to be chosen for intelligibility assessment in different applications. In overall word accuracy from an ASR system trained on clean signals has the highest correlation with intelligibility. However, as is the case with quality measures, none of the ASR scores correlate well in the context of enhancement schemes since such processes are known to improve machine-based scores without necessarily improving intelligibility. This demonstrates the limitation of ASR in intelligibility assessment. As an extension to word modelling in ASR, one major contribution of this work relates to the novel use of a data-driven (DD) classifier in this context. The classifier is trained on intelligibility information and its output scores relate directly to intelligibility rather than indirectly through quality or ASR scores as in earlier attempts. A critical obstacle with the development of such a DD classifier is establishing the large amount of ground truth necessary for training. This leads to the next significant contribution, namely the proposal of a convenient strategy to generate potentially unlimited amounts of synthetic ground truth based on a well-supported hypothesis that speech processings rarely improve intelligibility. Subsequent contributions include the search for good features that could enhance classification accuracy. Scores given by quality measures and ASR are indicative of intelligibility hence could serve as potential features for the data-driven intelligibility classifier. Both are in investigated in this research and results show ASR-based features to be superior. A final contribution is a novel feature set based on the concept of anchor models where each anchor represents a chosen degradation. Signal intelligibility is characterised by the similarity between the degradation under test and a cohort of degradation anchors. The anchoring feature set leads to an average classification accuracy of 88% with synthetic ground truth and 82% with human ground truth evaluation sets. The latter compares favourably with 69% achieved by WSS (the best quality measure) and 68% by word accuracy from a clean-trained ASR (the best ASR-based measure) which are assessed on identical test sets.
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Gonçalves, Alison Roberto. "In search of speech intelligibility." reponame:Repositório Institucional da UFSC, 2014. https://repositorio.ufsc.br/xmlui/handle/123456789/123415.
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Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Centro de Comunicação e Expressão, Programa de Pós-Graduação em Inglês: Estudos Linguísticos e Literários, 2014.Made available in DSpace on 2014-08-06T18:10:52Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 326295.pdf: 1686823 bytes, checksum: c201a4b03d4b80478f7008234f1431b4 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2014
A pesquisa que envolve a fala tem abordado a questão da inteligibilidade para entender como determinados aspectos fonológicos afetam a comunicação entre indivíduos que têm línguas-maternas diferentes, e que também usam inglês como uma segunda língua (L2). Assim, pesquisas empíricas são necessárias para informar o ensino, especialmente, no que tange aspectos da pronúncia da L2 que devem constituir o foco de instrução na sala de aula. Portanto, o presente estudo investigou a inteligibilidade das vogais altas anteriores do inglês focando (1) nas características acústicas das vogais altas anteriores do inglês produzidas por aprendizes brasileiros, (2) nos perfis dos ouvintes (proficiência da L2 e tempo de residência no Brasil), e (3) na familiaridade e frequência do léxico. Os falantes foram 20 estudantes brasileiros que gravaram sentenças contendo palavras com as vogais altas anteriores do inglês, /?/ e /?/. Para observar como essas categorias vocálicas organizavam-se na interlíngua dos falantes e, assim, selecionar os dados para o teste de inteligibilidade, plotagens dos dados em versão normalizada e não-normalizada foram obtidas. Para testar os efeitos de proximidade espectral na inteligibilidade dessas vogais, um critério baseado na proximidade espectral do primeiro formante (F1) foi estabelecido. Inteligibilidade foi avaliada com o uso de transcrição ortográfica (Derwing & Munro, 2005), e os ouvintes foram 32 usuários de inglês de 11 línguas-maternas diferentes. A análise acústica demonstrou que as vogais altas anteriores do inglês foram produzidas como vogais equivalentes (Flege, 1995), e tendiam a sobrepor-se. Resultados concernentes à inteligibilidade indicaram que a vogal tensa foi mais ininteligível, pois era inadequadamente transcrita como a vogal frouxa. Em uma análise qualitativa, considerando o item lexical que continha cada vogal, observou-se que processos fonológicos presentes nessas palavras, tais como desvozeamento de consoantes e palatalização, afetaram consideravelmente a inteligibilidade da fala. Além do mais, efeitos da proficiência do ouvinte na L2 foram testados e proficiência demonstrou-se ser uma importante característica individual para aferição da inteligibilidade da fala, pois observou-se que o nível de inteligibilidade aumentava juntamente com o nível de proficiência do ouvinte. O tempo de residência dos ouvintes no Brasil foi investigado como um indicador indireto de familiaridade com sotaque, mas as correlações não indicaram resultados significativos. Para analisar frequência lexical, o Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) foi utilizado. A familiaridade dos ouvintes com o léxico utilizado no teste de inteligibilidade foi também observada. As correlações revelaram que a relação entre frequência lexical, familiaridade com o léxico, e respostas corretas no teste de inteligibilidade eram significativas, demonstrando que quanto mais frequente o item lexical, mais familiar e mais inteligível era esse item também. Em suma, resultados demonstram que as vogais altas anteriores, quando não distinguidas, podem influenciar negativamente a inteligibilidade. Não obstante, existem outras variáveis linguísticas e variáveis relacionadas ao ouvinte que estão propensas a influenciar na decodificação da fala que, em investigações referentes à inteligibilidade, podem ser observadas em diferentes níveis (vogal, consoante, e nível da palavra).
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Singh, Maneesh Kumar. "Methods for Speech Intelligibility Enhancement." Thesis, Curtin University, 2017. http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11937/57107.
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Modulation domain has been reported to be a better alternative to Frequency domain for speech enhancement, as speech intelligibility is closely linked with the modulation spectrum. This suggests that the modulation spectrum may assist in the demarcation of speech and noise. Motivated by that, this thesis investigates the role of modulation domain towards the speech intelligibility improvements. Acknowledging the fact that the Gaussian assumption for all noise DFT coefficients does not necessarily hold, this thesis suggests the best noise density function which is suitable for both the frequency and modulation domain based speech applications.
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Leclère, Thibaud. "Towards a binaural model for predicting speech intelligibility among competing voices in rooms." Thesis, Vaulx-en-Velin, Ecole nationale des travaux publics, 2015. http://www.theses.fr/2015ENTP0008/document.
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Ce travail de thèse vise à proposer un modèle pouvant prédire l’intelligibilité d’une voix cible masquée par des sources concurrentes dans les salles. Un modèle a déjà été développé par Lavandier et Culling (2010) et est capable de prédire l’intelligibilité d’une cible en champ proche perturbée par plusieurs sources de bruit. Le travail présenté ici traite des nouvelles implémentations et expérimentations nécessaires pour étendre le modèle au cas de cibles distantes et au cas de voix concurrentes, qui présentent des propriétés acoustiques différentes des bruits stationnaires (fluctuation d’enveloppe, fréquence fondamentale, modulations de fréquence fondamentale). L’effet nuisible de la réverbération sur la parole cible a été implémenté avec succès. Cette nouvelle version du modèle permet une interprétation unifiée de plusieurs effetsperceptifs observés dans la littérature mais il présente une dépendance de la salle, ce qui limite son aspect prédictif. Des travaux expérimentaux ont été menés pour déterminer comment le modèle pourrait prendre en compte le cas de sources cibles et masquantes avec des spectres différents ainsi que le cas où plusieurs mécanismes auditifs opèrent simultanément (ségrégation par F0, démasquage spatialet écoute dans les creux de modulation)This PhD work aims to propose a model predicting the perceived intelligibility of a target speech masked by competing sources in rooms. An existing model developed by Lavandier and Culling (2010) is already able to predict speech intelligibility of a near-field target in the presence of multiple noise sources. The present work deals with new implementations and experimental work needed to extend the model tothe case of a distant target and to the case of masking voices, which present different acoustical properties than noises (envelope fluctuations, fundamental frequency, modulations of fundamental frequency). The detrimental effect of reverberation on the target speech has been successfully implemented. This new version of the model provides a unified interpretation of several perceptual effects previously observed in the literature but it presents a room dependency which limits its predictive power. Experimental work has been conducted to determine how the model could account for sources presenting different spectra, and to account for several auditory mechanisms operating simultaneously (F0 segregation, spatial unmasking and temporal dip listening)
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Chau, Chung-man Zenith. "Intelligibility of Cantonese speakers following glossectomy." Click to view the E-thesis via HKUTO, 2000. http://sunzi.lib.hku.hk/hkuto/record/B3620741X.
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Thesis (B.Sc)--University of Hong Kong, 2000."A dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Bachelor of Science (Speech and Hearing Sciences), the University of Hong Kong, May 10, 2000." Also available in print.
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Wagener, Kirsten Carola. "Factors influencing sentence intelligibility in noise." [S.l.] : [s.n.], 2003. http://deposit.ddb.de/cgi-bin/dokserv?idn=969986181.
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Knight, Stephen. "Speech intelligibility estimation via neural networks /." Online version of thesis, 1990. http://hdl.handle.net/1850/10595.
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Holstein, Jacob Scott. "On the Intelligibility of Grounding Autonomy." Thesis, Virginia Tech, 2019. http://hdl.handle.net/10919/90656.
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Metaphysical grounding has received a great deal of attention in the metaphysics literature within the last decade, offering what many see as an attractive theoretical alternative to other attempts to analyze the nature of fundamentality, e.g., dependence, supervenience, identity, conceptual analysis, etc. Still, a number of commentators note a bevy of issues facing the notion of grounding, leading some to believe it cannot perform the relevant work it has been tasked to do. One such issue is the purity dilemma, posed by Ted Sider, which follows from a plausible constraint placed on our theorizing about fundamentality, viz., that the fundamental bedrock of the world contains nothing but purely fundamental phenomena. It is argued that purity creates a problem for metaphysical grounding in that it makes it increasingly difficult to see what might ground the facts about what grounds what. In this paper, I explicate the purity dilemma, and an attempt made by Shamik Dasgupta to sidestep the challenge, and provide a secure grounding foundation for such facts. I then proceed to defend Dasgupta's view from objections made by Sider, and conclude that, at the very least, the crucial notion (autonomy) on which the former's view rests is intelligible, if it is not tenable.Master of Arts
In this paper I discuss an ongoing debate over the nature of metaphysical grounding. Metaphysical grounding (or, “grounding”) is of interest to metaphysicians due to the satisfying way in which it handles a number of long-standing problems in the field. As Johnathan Schaffer (2009) notes, metaphysics has often concerned itself with what the most basic nature of reality is like, and grounding promises to furnish many of our metaphysical theories with the tools to answer such questions. Still, there remains a number of problems with characterizing grounding. The relevant problem I tackle in this paper has to do with whether or not grounding can be understood in its own terms. Ted Sider, for example, has suspicions that it cannot. I argue, on the behalf of Shamik Dasgupta, that there is an intelligible way to understand grounding in its own terms, and work to provide constructive answers to some of Sider’s objections.
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Cole, David Ross. "Intelligibility enhancement of severely reverberant speech." Thesis, Queensland University of Technology, 1997.
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D'Aquila, Laura A. "Improving speech intelligibility in fluctuating background interference." Thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2016. http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/106025.
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Thesis: M. Eng., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2016.This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections.
Cataloged from student-submitted PDF version of thesis.
Includes bibliographical references (pages 41-42).
The masking release (MR; i.e., better speech recognition in fluctuating compared to continuous noise backgrounds) that is evident for normal-hearing (NH) listeners is generally reduced or absent in hearing-impaired (HI) listeners. In this study, a signal-processing technique was developed to improve MR in HI listeners and offer insight into the mechanisms influencing the size of MR. This technique compares short-term and long-term estimates of energy, increases the level of short-term segments whose energy is below the average energy, and normalizes the overall energy of the processed signal to be equivalent to that of the original long-term estimate. In consonant-identification tests, HI listeners achieved similar scores for processed and unprocessed stimuli in quiet and in continuous-noise backgrounds, while superior performance was obtained for the processed speech in some of the fluctuating background noises. Thus, the energy-normalized signals led to larger values of MR compared to that obtained with unprocessed signals.
by Laura A. D'Aquila.
M. Eng.
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Messing, David P. (David Patrick) 1979. "Predicting confusions and intelligibility of noisy speech." Thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2007. http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/42246.
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Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2007.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 202-207).
Current predictors of speech intelligibility are inadequate for making predictions of speech confusions caused by acoustic interference. This thesis is inspired by the need for a capability to understand and predict speech confusions caused by acoustic interference. The goal of this thesis is to develop models of auditory speech processing capable of predicting phonetic confusions by normally-hearing listeners, under a variety of acoustic distortions. In particular, we focus on modeling the Medial Olivocochlear efferent pathway (which provides feedback from the brain stem to the peripheral auditory system) and demonstrate its potential for speech identification in noise. Our results produced representations and performance that were robust to varying levels of additive noise and which mimicked human performance as measured by the Chi-squared test.
by David P. Messing.
Ph.D.
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Binns, Christine. "Role of prosodic cues in speech intelligibility." Thesis, Cardiff University, 2007. http://orca.cf.ac.uk/55671/.
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Listeners are often required to attend to speech in background noise. Coherent prosodic structure has been found to facilitate speech processing (Cutler, Dahan & Donselaar, 1997). The aim of this thesis is to investigate to what extent these prosodic cues, in particular fundamental frequency (FO), aid speech intelligibility in noise. Experiments measured Speech Reception Thresholds for sentences with different manipulations of their FO contour. These manipulations involved either a scaled reduction in FO variation, or the complete inversion of the FO contour. Experiments reported in Chapter 2 investigated the impact of these FO manipulations against speech-shaped noise and single-talker interferers. Inverting the FO contour was found to significantly degrade target speech intelligibility for both types of interferer, although a larger effect was observed with the single-talker interferer. No effect of altering the FO contour of the interferer was found. Low-pass filtering the FO contour (Chapter 3) showed that the most important frequencies lay at or below the syllable rate of speech, highlighting the importance of syllabic and suprasegmental fluctuations within the FO contour. Experiments in Chapter 4 compared synthesised and natural targets. Synthesised speech was found to be considerably less intelligible than natural speech. No consistent effect of FO inversion was noted for synthesised FO contours. However neither natural FO nor duration contours improved the intelligibility of the synthesised speech. Similar experiments using non-native English speakers (Chapter 5) showed a greater detriment to the perceived intelligibility of the speech with FO manipulations than for native speakers. Results are explained in terms of FO contours highlighting important content words. Intrinsic vowel pitch is also argued to contribute. Further study is required to determine why speech interferers caused listeners to rely more heavily on FO cues, and to investigate the influence of other prosodic cues on speech intelligibility.
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Valentini, Botinhão Cássia. "Intelligibility enhancement of synthetic speech in noise." Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/1842/8877.
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Speech technology can facilitate human-machine interaction and create new communication interfaces. Text-To-Speech (TTS) systems provide speech output for dialogue, notification and reading applications as well as personalized voices for people that have lost the use of their own. TTS systems are built to produce synthetic voices that should sound as natural, expressive and intelligible as possible and if necessary be similar to a particular speaker. Although naturalness is an important requirement, providing the correct information in adverse conditions can be crucial to certain applications. Speech that adapts or reacts to different listening conditions can in turn be more expressive and natural. In this work we focus on enhancing the intelligibility of TTS voices in additive noise. For that we adopt the statistical parametric paradigm for TTS in the shape of a hidden Markov model (HMM-) based speech synthesis system that allows for flexible enhancement strategies. Little is known about which human speech production mechanisms actually increase intelligibility in noise and how the choice of mechanism relates to noise type, so we approached the problem from another perspective: using mathematical models for hearing speech in noise. To find which models are better at predicting intelligibility of TTS in noise we performed listening evaluations to collect subjective intelligibility scores which we then compared to the models’ predictions. In these evaluations we observed that modifications performed on the spectral envelope of speech can increase intelligibility significantly, particularly if the strength of the modification depends on the noise and its level. We used these findings to inform the decision of which of the models to use when automatically modifying the spectral envelope of the speech according to the noise. We devised two methods, both involving cepstral coefficient modifications. The first was applied during extraction while training the acoustic models and the other when generating a voice using pre-trained TTS models. The latter has the advantage of being able to address fluctuating noise. To increase intelligibility of synthetic speech at generation time we proposed a method for Mel cepstral coefficient modification based on the glimpse proportion measure, the most promising of the models of speech intelligibility that we evaluated. An extensive series of listening experiments demonstrated that this method brings significant intelligibility gains to TTS voices while not requiring additional recordings of clear or Lombard speech. To further improve intelligibility we combined our method with noise-independent enhancement approaches based on the acoustics of highly intelligible speech. This combined solution was as effective for stationary noise as for the challenging competing speaker scenario, obtaining up to 4dB of equivalent intensity gain. Finally, we proposed an extension to the speech enhancement paradigm to account for not only energetic masking of signals but also for linguistic confusability of words in sentences. We found that word level confusability, a challenging value to predict, can be used as an additional prior to increase intelligibility even for simple enhancement methods like energy reallocation between words. These findings motivate further research into solutions that can tackle the effect of energetic masking on the auditory system as well as on higher levels of processing.
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Leopold, Sarah Yoho. "Factors Influencing the Prediction of Speech Intelligibility." The Ohio State University, 2016. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1460464847.
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Burleson, Deborah. "Training segmental productions for second language intelligibility." [Bloomington, Ind.] : Indiana University, 2007. http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?url_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:dissertation&res_dat=xri:pqdiss&rft_dat=xri:pqdiss:3255507.
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Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of Linguistics, 2007.Title from PDF t.p. (viewed Nov. 19, 2008). Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 68-03, Section: A, page: 0977. Advisers: Robert Port; Kenneth de Jong.
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Tan-Chow, Mayling. "Secularity and the intelligibility of divine action." Theological Research Exchange Network (TREN), 1992. http://www.tren.com.
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Brangers, Kirstin M. "Perceptual Ruler for Quantifying Speech Intelligibility in Cocktail Party Scenarios." UKnowledge, 2013. http://uknowledge.uky.edu/ece_etds/31.
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Systems designed to enhance intelligibility of speech in noise are difficult to evaluate quantitatively because intelligibility is subjective and often requires feedback from large populations for consistent evaluations. Attempts to quantify the evaluation have included related measures such as the Speech Intelligibility Index. These require separating speech and noise signals, which precludes its use on experimental recordings. This thesis develops a procedure using an Intelligibility Ruler (IR) for efficiently quantifying intelligibility. A calibrated Mean Opinion Score (MOS) method is also implemented in order to compare repeatability over a population of 24 subjective listeners. Results showed that subjects using the IR consistently estimated SII values of the test samples with an average standard deviation of 0.0867 between subjects on a scale from zero to one and R2=0.9421. After a calibration procedure from a subset of subjects, the MOS method yielded similar results with an average standard deviation of 0.07620 and R2=0.9181.While results suggest good repeatability of the IR method over a broad range of subjects, the calibrated MOS method is capable of producing results more closely related to actual SII values and is a simpler procedure for human subjects.
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Lo, Chi-yan Ada. "Intelligibility and acceptability measures of Cantonese dysarthric speech." Click to view the E-thesis via HKUTO, 1999. http://sunzi.lib.hku.hk/hkuto/record/B36209934.
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Thesis (B.Sc)--University of Hong Kong, 1999."A dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Bachelor of Science (Speech and Hearing Sciences), The University of Hong Kong, May 14, 1999." Also available in print.
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Isaac, Karl Bruce. "Intelligibility of synthetic speech in noise and reverberation." Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2015. http://hdl.handle.net/1842/15870.
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Synthetic speech is a valuable means of output, in a range of application contexts, for people with visual, cognitive, or other impairments or for situations were other means are not practicable. Noise and reverberation occur in many of these application contexts and are known to have devastating effects on the intelligibility of natural speech, yet very little was known about the effects on synthetic speech based on unit selection or hidden Markov models. In this thesis, we put forward an approach for assessing the intelligibility of synthetic and natural speech in noise, reverberation, or a combination of the two. The approach uses an experimental methodology consisting of Amazon Mechanical Turk, Matrix sentences, and noises that approximate the real-world, evaluated with generalized linear mixed models. The experimental methodologies were assessed against their traditional counterparts and were found to provide a number of additional benefits, whilst maintaining equivalent measures of relative performance. Subsequent experiments were carried out to establish the efficacy of the approach in measuring intelligibility in noise and then reverberation. Finally, the approach was applied to natural speech and the two synthetic speech systems in combinations of noise and reverberation. We have examine and report on the intelligibility of current synthesis systems in real-life noises and reverberation using techniques that bridge the gap between the audiology and speech synthesis communities and using Amazon Mechanical Turk. In the process, we establish Amazon Mechanical Turk and Matrix sentences as valuable tools in the assessment of synthetic speech intelligibility.
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Ellaham, Nicolas. "Binaural Speech Intelligibility Prediction and Nonlinear Hearing Devices." Thesis, Université d'Ottawa / University of Ottawa, 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/10393/31713.
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A new objective measurement system to predict speech intelligibility in binaural listening conditions is proposed for use with nonlinear hearing devices. Digital processing inside such devices often involves nonlinear operations such as clipping, compression, and noise reduction algorithms. Standard objective measures such as the Articulation Indeix (AI), the Speech Intelligibility Index (SII) and the Speech Transmission Index (STI) have been developed for monaural listening. Binaural extensions of these measures have been proposed in the literature, essentially consisting of a binaural pre-processing stage followed by monaural intelligibility prediction using the better ear or the binaurally enhanced signal.
In this work, a three-stage extension of the binaural SII approach is proposed that deals with nonlinear acoustic input signals. The reference-based model operates as follows: (1) a stage to deal with nonlinear processing based on a signal-separation model to recover estimates of speech, noise and distortion signals at the output of hearing devices; (2) a binaural processing stage using the Equalization-Cancellation (EC) model; and (3) a stage for intelligibility prediction using the SII or the short-time Extended SII (ESII).
Multiple versions of the model have been developed and tested for use with hearing devices. A software simulator is used to perform hearing-device processing under various binaural listening conditions. Details of the modeling procedure are discussed along with an experimental framework for collecting subjective intelligibility data. In the absence of hearing-device processing, the model successfully predicts speech intelligibility in all spatial configurations considered. Varying levels of success were obtained using two simple distortion modeling approaches with different distortion mechanisms. Future refinements to the model are proposed based on the results discussed in this work.
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Libbey, Brad W. "Reverberant word intelligibility and psychological models of dereverberation." Diss., Georgia Institute of Technology, 2003. http://hdl.handle.net/1853/15808.
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Muthukumarasamy, Arulkumaran. "IMPACT OF MICROPHONE POSITIONAL ERRORS ON SPEECH INTELLIGIBILITY." UKnowledge, 2009. http://uknowledge.uky.edu/gradschool_theses/602.
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The speech of a person speaking in a noisy environment can be enhanced through electronic beamforming using spatially distributed microphones. As this approach demands precise information about the microphone locations, its application is limited in places where microphones must be placed quickly or changed on a regular basis. Highly precise calibration or measurement process can be tedious and time consuming. In order to understand tolerable limits on the calibration process, the impact of microphone position error on the intelligibility is examined. Analytical expressions are derived by modeling the microphone position errors as a zero mean uniform distribution. Experiments and simulations were performed to show relationships between precision of the microphone location measurement and loss in intelligibility. A variety of microphone array configurations and distracting sources (other interfering speech and white noise) are considered. For speech near the threshold of intelligibility, the results show that microphone position errors with standard deviations less than 1.5cm can limit losses in intelligibility to within 10% of the maximum (perfect microphone placement) for all the microphone distributions examined. Of different array distributions experimented, the linear array tends to be more vulnerable whereas the non-uniform 3D array showed a robust performance to positional errors.
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Yang, Lening. "Computer modelling of speech intelligibility in underground stations." Thesis, London South Bank University, 1997. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.245130.
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The aim of this study is to develop a ray tracing computer model for predicting speech intelligibility in underground stations. There are four parts to the study: correctly modelling the sound field in underground stations; developing a mathematical model for predicting speech intelligibility using a ray tracing computer model; using the model to investigate ways of improving speech intelligibility in underground stations; and using the model to analyze the sound field in long enclosures with multiple source systems. Four computer models have been developed for investigating acoustic parameters in different conditions or different types of space. The models have been validated with scale model measurements, and the predictions have also been compared with classical room acoustics. Three new contributions to the ray tracing computer model have been developed in this project: the reverberation time tail compensation, the exact representation of curved surfaces, and diffraction effects. A mathematical model for predicting speech transmission index in long enclosures using the ray tracing method has been developed. The model has been shown to be more accurate and efficient by comparison with scale model measurements and measurementsm ade in a real underground station. The model has been used to investigate ways of improving speech intelligibility in different noise levels and with different source spacing. Finally, the quasi-diffuse sound field theory for long enclosures with multiple source systems has been developed and justified as an approximation method for a quick investigation of speech intelligibility in underground stations.
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Lewine, Andrew (Andrew P. ). "Speech filtering for improving intelligibility in noisy transients." Thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2011. http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/66433.
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Thesis (M. Eng.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2011.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.
Includes bibliographical references.
Hearing impairment is a problem that affects a large percentage of the population. Cochlear implants allow those with profound or total hearing loss to regain some hearing by stimulating auditory nerve fibers with implanted electrodes, in response to sound picked up by an external microphone. The signal processing chain from microphone input to stimulation output is an important factor in the overall speech intelligibility of the implant system. This thesis work improves on an existing ultra-low-power cochlear implant system by utilizing an improved noise and power efficient bandpass filter bank to implement a novel frequency-selective gain control algorithm capable of reducing, and in some cases removing, loud transient noises, thereby improving speech intelligibility. This gain control algorithm takes advantage of the inherent frequency-specific gain control afforded by the improved bandpass filter topology. This contribution makes an improvement to the existing state-of-the-art system in both power efficiency and performance.
by Andrew Lewine.
M.Eng.
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Hesse, Christoph. "Cross-linguistic metaphor intelligibility between English and German." Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2015. http://hdl.handle.net/1842/19514.
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Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT, Lakoff & Johnson 1980; Lakoff, 1983, 1987, 1993, 2008, 2009), the most prominent cognitive approach to metaphor comprehension, argues that the nature of interconnections within the conceptual system is inherently metaphoric-analogical and that systematic patterns in linguistic metaphor reveal these cognitive interconnections. Relevance Theory (RT, Sperber & Wilson, 1986; Wilson & Sperber, 1993; Sperber & Wilson, 1995; Wilson & Sperber, 2002, 2004) and Graded Salience (GS, Giora, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2003; Peleg et al., 2008; Peleg & Giora, 2011) disagree that systematic patterns in linguistic metaphor can be taken as direct evidence of their cognitive representation. A metaphor consists of two concepts, a source and a target concept. The metaphor implies an analogy between the two concepts. To comprehend a metaphor is to infer under which conditions the implied analogy holds. The meaning of the two concepts is pragmatically enriched by these additional assumptions. Metaphor comprehension is an inferential process. The result of this process is the enriched meaning of the metaphor. This meaning can become conventionalised, in which case it often serves as an inferential shortcut: instead of having to consider all conceptually possible interpretations and their plausibility in the context of the analogy, speakers who are familiar with the conventional (i.e. idiomatic) meaning are provided with a default interpretation. According to CMT, the inferential process is a process of interconnecting primary embodied concepts to ever more complex higher-order concepts. On this view, a metaphoric idiomatic meaning is such a complex concept where the conceptual interconnections are conventional. According to RT, the inferential process is a process of inferring a meaning that is in line with the speaker's communicative intent, the discourse context, and interlocutors' expectations of the cognitive relevance of potential inferences. On this view, metaphoric idiomatic meanings are highly salient inferences with a high degree of contextual relevance because speakers' expectations of relevance are conventionalised. According to GS, the inferential process consists of two modules that work in parallel: a module that infers salient meanings based on linguistic knowledge and a module that enriches the meaning by taking non-linguistic knowledge such as conceptual, experiential, perceptual, contextual, and world knowledge into consideration. On this view, metaphoric idiomatic meanings are highly salient inferences because of speakers' knowledge of non-conceptual linguistic conventions. This thesis investigates the claims made by CMT, RT and GS by experimentally testing the cross-linguistic communicability of metaphoric proverbs with idiomatic meanings. Proverbs are selected such that the similarity of metaphors' source and target concepts, expectations of contextual relevance, and the degree of familiarity with proverbs' conventional wording is cross-linguistically maximised. If CMT is correct, then when cross-linguistic conceptual similarity is maximised in this way, monolingual native speakers should find L2 language-specific metaphors communicable. If RT and GS are correct, then monolingual native speakers should find L2-specific metaphors less communicable than L1-specific and non-language-specific metaphoric proverbs because they lack knowledge of the necessary non-conceptual linguistic conventions. Cross-linguistic metaphor communicability is measured in three ways in the experiments: (1) through reading/response times, (2) through plausibility judgements, and (3) through a context creation task. Results show that cross-linguistic metaphor communicability of L2-specific metaphors is lowered for monolingual native speakers on all three measures.
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Al, Dabel Maryam. "Intelligibility model optimisation approaches for speech pre-enhancement." Thesis, University of Sheffield, 2016. http://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/15830/.
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The goal of improving the intelligibility of broadcast speech is being met by a recent new direction in speech enhancement: near-end intelligibility enhancement. In contrast to the conventional speech enhancement approach that processes the corrupted speech at the receiver-side of the communication chain, the near-end intelligibility enhancement approach pre-processes the clean speech at the transmitter-side, i.e. before it is played into the environmental noise. In this work, we describe an optimisation-based approach to near-end intelligibility enhancement using models of speech intelligibility to improve the intelligibility of speech in noise. This thesis first presents a survey of speech intelligibility models and how the adverse acoustic conditions affect the intelligibility of speech. The purpose of this survey is to identify models that we can adopt in the design of the pre-enhancement system. Then, we investigate the strategies humans use to increase speech intelligibility in noise. We then relate human strategies to existing algorithms for near-end intelligibility enhancement. A closed-loop feedback approach to near-end intelligibility enhancement is then introduced. In this framework, speech modifications are guided by a model of intelligibility. For the closed-loop system to work, we develop a simple spectral modification strategy that modifies the first few coefficients of an auditory cepstral representation such as to maximise an intelligibility measure. We experiment with two contrasting measures of objective intelligibility. The first, as a baseline, is an audibility measure named 'glimpse proportion' that is computed as the proportion of the spectro-temporal representation of the speech signal that is free from masking. We then propose a discriminative intelligibility model, building on the principles of missing data speech recognition, to model the likelihood of specific phonetic confusions that may occur when speech is presented in noise. The discriminative intelligibility measure is computed using a statistical model of speech from the speaker that is to be enhanced. Interim results showed that, unlike the glimpse proportion based system, the discriminative based system did not improve intelligibility. We investigated the reason behind that and we found that the discriminative based system was not able to target the phonetic confusion with the fixed spectral shaping. To address that, we introduce a time-varying spectral modification. We also propose to perform the optimisation on a segment-by-segment basis which enables a robust solution against the fluctuating noise. We further combine our system with a noise-independent enhancement technique, i.e. dynamic range compression. We found significant improvement in non-stationary noise condition, but no significant differences to the state-of-the art system (spectral shaping and dynamic range compression) where found in stationary noise condition.
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Ishikawa, Keiko. "Towards Development of Intelligibility Assessment for Dysphonic Speech." University of Cincinnati / OhioLINK, 2017. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1490351996395082.
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Hashemi, Hosseinabad Hedieh. "Towards Understanding Intelligibility of Velopharyngeal Insufficiency (VPI) Speech." University of Cincinnati / OhioLINK, 2018. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1544100340591276.
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Sotillo, Catherine Frances. "Phonological reduction and intelligibility in task-oriented dialogue." Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 1997. http://hdl.handle.net/1842/21544.
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This thesis explores the implications of Lindblom's theory of Hyper- and Hypo-articulation (Lindblom, 1983, 1990) for word intelligibility and the likely application of phonological reduction processes in spontaneous discourse, using data from the HCRC Map Task Corpus. Lindblom claims that variability in articulatory clarity is a reflection of speakers' assessments of their listeners' information requirements: speakers hyper-articulate when listeners require maximum acoustic input from with information from other sources. To prevent speakers from over-economising to a point of unintelligibility, hypo-articulation is governed by a constraint of lexical distinctiveness: speakers hypo-articulate only while listeners are able to distinguish the target from competing lexical items. Three main questions are addressed. First, do the informational needs of the listener affect the articulatory clarity of words produced in spontaneous conversation? A series of intelligibility experiments shows that repeated mentions of landmark names are less intelligible than their introductory mentions, independent of which speaker utters either mention, and who can see the landmark on their map. Although the results can be interpreted as supporting Lindblom's view, textual Giveness (Prince, 1981) is shown to depend upon what the speaker knows, rather than what the speaker believes her listener to know. The reduction in clarity associated with an increase in available information is not necessarily listener-oriented as the H & H theory proposes. Secondly, do phonological processes such as word-final /d/-deletion or place assimilation contribute to intelligibility loss? Although reduction processes are found to be more prevalent in tokens from spontaneous discourse than in matched citation forms, they generally fail to account for effects of repetition. An increase in assimilation is found for repeated mentions of nasal-final stimuli in pre-velar position, but no effects is found for assimilation in pre-label position, or for word-final /d/-deletion, nor is an effect found for the duration of schwa in metrically Weak initial syllables of polysyllabic words.
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Schoener, Robin S. "Nonnative Prosody and the Intelligibility of Ambiguous Utterances." Thesis, Harvard University, 2015. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:24078370.
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This study examines nonnative prosody and intelligibility. Past research has suggested that prosody that is unfamiliar or inappropriate in some way can adversely affect the intelligibility of speech (e.g., Hahn, 2004; Tajima, Port & Dalby, 1997; Grover, Jamieson & Dobrovlosky, 1987; Field, 2005). In this study, the effect of overall prosody rather than the effects of particular prosodic features is analyzed.
Fifteen native and 15 nonnative speakers were recorded reading identical sets of ambiguous sentences while viewing cartoon drawings. Cartoons viewed by 8 members of each speaker group portrayed one of the two possible interpretations (“Version A”) for each sentence. Cartoons seen by the remaining 7 speakers of each group showed the alternative (“Version B”) interpretations. Recordings were divided and rearranged into new soundtracks containing a different speaker for every sentence. Fifteen native listeners viewed documents showing the Version A and Version B cartoons of each sentence side by side while listening to the new soundtracks, indicating which of the two cartoon versions they believed each speaker had viewed when recording.
Listeners identified the cartoon seen by the speaker significantly less often when the speaker was a nonnative, suggesting a relationship between speaker type and intelligibility. Results were further subdivided into 4 categories of structural ambiguity. Of those, compound noun vs. adjective + noun ambiguities (e.g. White House vs. white house) accounted for most of listeners’ errors in disambiguation.
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Pelley, Katherine. "Factors affecting message intelligibility of cued speech transliterators." [Tampa, Fla] : University of South Florida, 2008. http://purl.fcla.edu/usf/dc/et/SFE0002580.
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Cook, Victoria L. "Speech intelligibility in cross-dialectal multi-talker babble." Connect to resource, 2009. http://hdl.handle.net/1811/37239.
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Whitehill, Tara Loraine. "Speech intelligibility in Cantonese speakers with congenital dysarthria." Thesis, Hong Kong : University of Hong Kong, 1997. http://sunzi.lib.hku.hk/hkuto/record.jsp?B19884163.
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Geoffroy, Nancy Anne. "Measuring Speech Intelligibility in Voice Alarm Communication Systems." Link to electronic thesis, 2005. http://www.wpi.edu/Pubs/ETD/Available/etd-050405-192800/.
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Thesis (M.S.) -- Worcester Polytechnic Institute.Keywords: speech intelligibility; voice alarm communication system; common intelligibility scale (CIS); speech transmission index (STI). Includes bibliographical references (p. 80-82).
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Chua, W. W. "Speech recognition predictability of a Cantonese speech intelligibility index." Click to view the E-thesis via HKUTO, 2004. http://sunzi.lib.hku.hk/hkuto/record/B30509737.
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Dymarz, Rafal. "The intelligibility of the physical world in Plato's Timaeus." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 2001. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk3/ftp04/MQ60370.pdf.
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Mak, Cheuk-yan Charin. "Effects of speech and noise on Cantonese speech intelligibility." Click to view the E-thesis via HKUTO, 2006. http://sunzi.lib.hku.hk/hkuto/record/B37989790.
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Raghunathan, Anusha. "EVALUATION OF INTELLIGIBILITY AND SPEAKER SIMILARITY OF VOICE TRANSFORMATION." UKnowledge, 2011. http://uknowledge.uky.edu/gradschool_theses/101.
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Voice transformation refers to a class of techniques that modify the voice characteristics either to conceal the identity or to mimic the voice characteristics of another speaker. Its applications include automatic dialogue replacement and voice generation for people with voice disorders. The diversity in applications makes evaluation of voice transformation a challenging task. The objective of this research is to propose a framework to evaluate intentional voice transformation techniques. Our proposed framework is based on two fundamental qualities: intelligibility and speaker similarity. Intelligibility refers to the clarity of the speech content after voice transformation and speaker similarity measures how well the modified output disguises the source speaker. We measure intelligibility with word error rates and speaker similarity with likelihood of identifying the correct speaker. The novelty of our approach is, we consider whether similarly transformed training data are available to the recognizer. We have demonstrated that this factor plays a significant role in intelligibility and speaker similarity for both human testers and automated recognizers. We thoroughly test two classes of voice transformation techniques: pitch distortion and voice conversion, using our proposed framework. We apply our results for patients with voice hypertension using video self-modeling and preliminary results are presented.
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Chua, W. W., and 蔡蕙慧. "Speech recognition predictability of a Cantonese speech intelligibility index." Thesis, The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong), 2004. http://hub.hku.hk/bib/B30509737.
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Mak, Cheuk-yan Charin, and 麥芍欣. "Effects of speech and noise on Cantonese speech intelligibility." Thesis, The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong), 2006. http://hub.hku.hk/bib/B37989790.
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MacPherson, Alexandra. "The factors affectng the psychometric function for speech intelligibility." Thesis, University of Strathclyde, 2013. http://oleg.lib.strath.ac.uk:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=18871.
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Older listeners often report difficulties understanding speech in noisy environments. Increasing the level of the speech relative to the background - e.g. by way of a hearing aid - usually leads to an increase in intelligibility. The amount of perceptual benefit that can be gained from a given improvement in signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), however, is not fixed: it instead depends entirely on the slope of the psychometric function. The shallower the slope, the less benefit the listener will receive. The aim of the research presented in this thesis was to better understand the factors which lead to shallow slopes. A systematic survey of published psychometric functions considered the factors which affect slope. Speech maskers, modulated-noise maskers, and target/masker confusability were all found to contribute to shallow slopes. Experiment 1 examined the role of target/masker confusion by manipulating masker intelligibility. Intelligible maskers were found to give shallower slopes than unintelligible ones but subsequent acoustic analysis demonstrated that modulation differences between the maskers were responsible for this effect. This was supported by the fact that the effect was seen at low SNRs. Experiment 2 confirmed that the effects of modulation and target/masker confusion occur at different SNRs. Experiments 3 and 4 demonstrated that directing attention to the target speech could "undo" the effects of target/masker confusion. In Experiments 5 and 6 a new method was developed to study whether slope effects are relevant to "real-world" situations. The results suggested that using continuous speech targets gave shallower slopes than standard speech-in-noise tests. There was little evidence found to suggest that shallow slopes are exacerbated for older or hearing-impaired listeners. It is concluded that in the complex demands of everyday listening environments the perceptual benefit received from a given gain in SNR may be considerably less than would be predicted by standard speech-in-noise paradigms.
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Munyandamutsa, Jean Baptiste. "Study of the Rwandan learners' intelligibility in spoken English." Thesis, Cardiff University, 2005. http://orca.cf.ac.uk/55571/.
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The present study investigates the phonological productive and perceptual competence of a group of Rwandan learners of English and the effect that phonological deviations have on their intelligibility and comprehension in spoken English. In order to discover the hierarchy and degree of difficulty these subjects have in the segmental and suprasegmental features of English, productive and perceptual tests of words and sentences were designed and administered to a group of 60 subjects. The study also attempts to explain the effect of various interlanguage phenomena which occur in the production and perception of the pronunciation of English by Rwandan speakers. The results of this study support many of the claims of CA, EA and phonological interlanguage. Chapter One gives background sociolinguistic information on the roles of Kinyarwanda, French, Kiswahili and English in Rwanda. Chapter Two discusses a number of theoretical key issues involved in language learning and acquisition. Chapter Three defines the topic of the study, i.e. intelligibility and comprehension, to gain insight into the study and to provide a framework for the research design and methodology. Chapter Four is a description of the Kinyarwanda and English phonological systems, which is the basis of the predictions of the difficulties and the design of data for Chapters Five and Six. Chapter Five analyses, categorizes and explains the source of deviations in the data gathered from subjects' pronunciation of words and sentences as interpreted by native English speakers. Chapter Six analyzes the effect of phonological deviations on the subjects' comprehension of spoken English. Chapter Seven concludes the whole study with a discussion of the major findings, and suggests some useful steps towards more effective teaching of the pronunciation for better intelligibility and comprehension in English.
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Cruz, Neide de Fátima Cesar da. "Pronunciation intelligibility in spontaneous speech of brazilian learners englisg." Florianópolis, SC, 2004. http://repositorio.ufsc.br/xmlui/handle/123456789/86878.
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Tese (doutorado) - Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Centro de Comunicação e Expressão. Programa de Pós-graduação em Letras/Inglês e Literatura Correspondente.Made available in DSpace on 2012-10-21T11:37:25Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0
The main aim of this study is to find out the extent to which features of
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GHIMIRE, SWATANTRA. "Speech Intelligibility Measurement on the basis of ITU-T Recommendation P.863." Thesis, Högskolan i Halmstad, Laboratoriet för intelligenta system, 2012. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:hh:diva-20023.
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Objective speech intelligibility measurement techniques like AI (Articulation Index) and AI based STI (Speech Transmission Index) fail to assess speech intelligibility in modern telecommunication networks that use several non-linear processing for enhancing speech. Moreover, these techniques do not allow prediction of single individual CVC (Consonant Vowel Consonant) word intelligibility scores. ITU-T P.863 standard [1], which was developed for assessing speech quality, is used as a starting point to develop a simple new model for predicting subjective speech intelligibility of individual CVC words. Subjective intelligibility measurements were carried out for a large set of speech degradations. The subjective test uses single CVC word presentations in an eight alternative closed response set experiment. Subjects assess individual degraded CVC words and an average of correct recognition is used as the intelligibility score for a particular CVC word. The first subjective database uses CVC words that have variations in the first consonant i.e. /C/ous (represented as "kæʊs" using International Phonetic Association phonetic alphabets). This database is used for developing the objective model, while a new database based on VC words (Vowel Consonant) that uses variations in the second consonant (a/C/ e.g. aH, aL) is used for validating the model. ITU-T P.863 shows very poor results with a correlation of 0.30 for the first subjective database. A first extension to make P.863 suited for intelligibility prediction is done by restructuring speech material to meet the temporal structure requirements (speech+silence+speech) set for standard P.863 measurements. The restructuring is done by concatenating every original and degraded CVC word with itself. There is no significant improvement in correlation (0.34) when using P.863 on the restructured first subjective database (speech material meets temporal requirements). In this thesis a simple model based on P.863 is developed for assessing intelligibility of individual CVC words. The model uses a linear combination of a simple time clipping indicator (missing speech parts) and a “Good frame count” indicator which is based on the local perceptual (frame by frame) signal to noise ratio. Using this model on the restructured first database, a reasonably good correlation of 0.81 is seen between subjective scores and the model output values. For the validation database, a correlation of around 0.76 is obtained. Further validation on an existing database at TNO, which uses time clipping degradation only, shows an excellent correlation of 0.98. Although a reasonably good correlation is seen on the first database and the validation database, it is too low for reliable measurements. Further validation and development is required, nevertheless the results show that a perception-based technique that uses internal representations of signals can be used for predicting subjective intelligibility scores of individual CVC words.
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Hoek, Dorothy Christine. "Towards an objective measure of speakers' intelligibility derived from the speech wave envelope." Thesis, University of British Columbia, 1988. http://hdl.handle.net/2429/27947.
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This study investigates the possibility of a relationship between amplitude modulation in the speech envelope and a speaker's intelligibility or articulatory clarity. It aims at developing an intelligibility measure called the Modulation Index (MI).
Speech samples from several English speakers and one French speaker were recorded and digitized. Speakers were asked to produce speech under three articulatory conditions: Underarticulated, Normally Articulated, and Overarticulated. A computer program was developed for calculation of MI, based on the amount of amplitude modulation depth in the envelope of each digitized speech sample. The MI values so obtained were compared with the corresponding ratings from English-speaking listeners who judged the articulatory clarity of the recorded utterances.
Results indicate that the relationship between the perceptual data and the Modulation Index in its present form is weak and non-monotonic. Several factors may have affected the results of the comparison between the MI values and the perceptual data. There are indications that speakers were not always successful in producing the intended articulatory conditions. Also, despite
precautions, there were some differences in intensity and duration between utterances from the three conditions. It is concluded that there is some correlation between amplitude modulation in speech envelopes and speakers' intelligibility or articulatory clarity. However, the Modulation Index will require modification before it can become a useful tool. Some modifications were briefly explored, and possible further modifications to both the Modulation Index and the experimental design are suggested for future investigations.Medicine, Faculty of
Audiology and Speech Sciences, School of
Graduate
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Howard-Jones, Paul Alexander. "Spectral degradation of speech and its relation to the simulation of hearing loss." Thesis, University of Exeter, 1989. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.236515.
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Chau, Ha-fong Cynthia. "Single-word intelligibility in Cantonese speakers with repaired cleft palate." Click to view the E-thesis via HKUTO, 2001. http://sunzi.lib.hku.hk/hkuto/record/B36207792.
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Thesis (B.Sc)--University of Hong Kong, 2001."A dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Bachelor of Science (Speech and Hearing Sciences), The University of Hong Kong, 4th May, 2001." Also available in print.