This study investigated the perceptual contributions of vowels and consonants to Mandarin sentence intelligibility. Mandarin sentences were edited using a noise-replacement paradigm to preserve various amounts of segmental information and presented to normal-hearing listeners to recognize. The vowel-only Mandarin sentences yielded a remarkable 3:1 intelligibility advantage over the consonant-on...

The study investigates the effect of speech rate on the temporal organization of syllable production of in Hong Kong Cantonese. The results show that all the component segments of the test syllables, including the vowel-nasal transitions and elementelement transitions in the diphthongs, contribute to the reduction of the entire syllable durations in fast speech. While the percentages of duratio...

The accuracy of noise estimation is important for the performance of a speech denoising system. Most noise estimators suffer from either overestimation or underestimation on the noise level. An overestimate on noise magnitude will cause serious speech distortion for speech denoising. Conversely, a great quantity of residual noise will occur when the noise magnitude is underestimated. Accurately...

Hangul is clustered into six different types in general. Type clustering has an effect of coarse classification in syllable matching and becomes the pre-processing stage for the segmentation in the grapheme matching process. In this paper, we define a set of grapheme region of a preconsonants, vowel and post-consonant, that can absorb the change of the character’s shape and the noise. A method ...