Increasing the number of channels at low frequencies improves discrimination of fundamental frequency (F0) in cochlear implants (Geurts, L., Wouters, J., 2004. Better place-coding of the fundamental frequency in cochlear implants. J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 115 (2), 844-852). We conducted three experiments to test whether improved F0 discrimination can be translated into increased speech intelligibili...

Speech utterances in a given language are known to be less intelligible to second-language (L2) listeners than to native listeners. This study is aimed at quantifying the reduction of speech intelligibility due to non-nativeness of the listener. Two types of experiments were carried out: Speech Reception Threshold (SRT) experiments for obtaining a quantitative measure of speech intelligibility,...

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 poss...

This study tested the importance of F0 variation for tone language comprehension. The intelligibility of Mandarin sentences with natural F0 contours was compared to the intelligibility of monotone (flat-F0) sentences created via speech resynthesis. In a quiet background, flat-F0 speech was just as intelligible as natural speech (about 94% intelligible), highlighting the robustness of the langua...

In this paper, we evaluate the performance of several state-of-the-art objective measures in terms of predicting speech intelligibility in Mandarin of the processed noisy signals by speech enhancement algorithms. The speech signals were first corrupted by three types of noises at two signal-to-noise ratios, followed by four classes of speech enhancement algorithms. The objective intelligibility...

A distortion-weighted glimpsing metric developed for estimating monaural speech intelligibility is extended to predict binaural speech intelligibility in noise. Two aspects of binaural listening, the better ear effect and the binaural advantage, are taken into account in the new metric, which predicts intelligibility using monaural target and masker signals and their location, and is therefore ...

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. ...

BACKGROUND Oral tumor resections cause articulation deficiencies, depending on the site, extent of resection, type of reconstruction, and tongue stump mobility. OBJECTIVES To evaluate the speech intelligibility of patients undergoing total, subtotal, or partial glossectomy, before and after speech therapy. PATIENTS AND METHODS Twenty-seven patients (24 men and 3 women), aged 34 to 77 years ...

Cross-lingual voice conversion (XVC) transforms the speaker identity of a source to that target who speaks different language. Due intrinsic differences between languages, converted speech may carry an unwanted foreign accent. In this paper, we first investigate intelligibility and confirm performance degradation caused by accent/intelligibility issue. With goal generating native-sounding speec...