Most noise reduction algorithms rely on obtaining reliable estimates of the SNR of each frequency bin. For that reason, much work has been done in analyzing the behavior and performance of SNR estimation algorithms in the context of improving speech quality and reducing speech distortions (e.g., musical noise). Comparatively little work has been reported, however, regarding the analysis and inv...

Speech cannot be understood if it cannot be heard. Therefore, audibility is undoubtedly a major goal of amplification for children and adults with hearing loss. In restoring audibility, it is often assumed that the listener can extract speech cues over the entire range of speech frequencies. This assumption is true for a person with mild to moderate hearing losses, but is not true when hearing ...

Speech output, whether live, recorded or synthetic, is often employed in difficult listening conditions. Context-sensitive speech modifications aim to promote intelligibility while maintaining quality and listener comfort. The current study used objective measures of intelligibility and quality to compare five energy reallocation strategies operating under equal energy and preserved duration co...

Speech intelligibility can be severely compromised in environments where there are several competing speakers. It may be possible, however, to improve speech intelligibility in such environments by manipulating certain acoustic parameters known to facilitate the segregation of competing signals. The first step in designing such a feature-rich audio display is to understand the significant eleme...

PURPOSE To determine the mechanisms of speech intelligibility impairment due to neurologic impairments, intelligibility decline was modeled as a function of co-occurring changes in the articulatory, resonatory, phonatory, and respiratory subsystems. METHOD Sixty-six individuals diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) were studied longitudinally. The disease-related changes in artic...

A speech corpus is available in Romanian to use as the common material in speech perception and automatic speech recognition. It consists of high-quality audio of 400 sentences spoken by each of 12 speakers. Utterances are simple, syntactically identical phrases such as “muta bronz cu p 2 agale.” Preliminary intelligibility tests using the audio signals suggest that the collected speech is easi...

This paper explores the relationship between intelligibility and comprehensibility in speech synthesizers, and it designs an appropriate comprehension task for evaluating the speech synthesizers’ comprehensibility. Previous studies have predicted that a speech synthesizer with higher intelligibility will have higher performance in comprehension. Also, since the two most popular speech synthesis...