Three experiments were performed to evaluate the use of subjective intelligibility estimations as a method for measuring hearing aid benefit. Subjective and objective speech intelligibility scores were compared for young normal-hearing and elderly hearing-impaired listeners. Objective intelligibility scores were obtained using the Connected Speech Test (CST). This test consists of conversationa...

To reduce time and costs in the development process of noise reduction algorithms, an objective intelligibility measure is crucial. Such a measure has to show high correlation with speech intelligibility determined by real listening experiments. In the past several measures were found that perform reliable in a particular scenario when only the spectral amplitude of a noisy signal is modified. ...

PURPOSE We investigated the contribution of vowel space, articulation rate, maximum utterance length, and language skills to intelligibility in 30-36 month old children with CP. We also examined differences among variables for 3 subgroups of children with CP and a small group of typically developing (TD) children. METHOD Nineteen children with CP and 5 TD children provided speech samples, and...

PURPOSE This study investigated the effect of rate control methods (RCMs) on speaking rate (SR), articulation rate (AR), and intelligibility in dysarthric speakers. METHOD Nineteen dysarthric patients (7 unilateral upper motor neuron dysarthria, 6 hypokinetic, 3 flaccid, 3 ataxic) participated. SR, AR and intelligibility ratings were determined on the basis of 1-min recorded reading passages....

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...

Some evidence, mostly drawn from experiments using only a single moderate rate of speech, suggests that low-frequency amplitude modulations may be particularly important for intelligibility. Here, two experiments investigated intelligibility of temporally distorted sentences across a wide range of simulated speaking rates, and two metrics were used to predict results. Sentence intelligibility w...

Intelligibility of sentences gated with a single primary rate (0.5-8 Hz, 25-75% duty cycle) or gated with an additional concurrent rate of 24 Hz and a 50% duty cycle was examined in older normal-hearing and hearing-impaired listeners. With a stronger effect of age than hearing loss, intelligibility tended to increase with primary rate and duty cycle, but varied for dual-rate gating. Reduction i...

Most current techniques for near-end speech intelligibility enhancement have focused on processing clean input signals, however, in realistic environments, the input is often noisy. Processing noisy speech for intelligibility enhancement using algorithms developed for clean signals can lower the perceptual quality of the samples when they are listened in quiet. Here we address the quality loss ...

The effect of masking due to fluctuating sources on speech intelligibility is a phenomenon difficult to predict. Intelligibility scores vary with the efficiency of the energetic masking while the linguistic content of the message and listener’s cognitive performances add to the general incertitude that peaks for the case of masking speech. The present contribution proposes a signal-based assess...

Synthetic speech can be modified to improve intelligibility in noise. In order to perform modifications automatically, it would be useful to have an objective measure that could predict the intelligibility of modified synthetic speech for human listeners. We analysed the impact on intelligibility – and on how well objective measures predict it – when we separately modify speaking rate, fundamen...