Although it is well accepted that the speech motor system (SMS) is activated during speech perception, the functional role of this activation remains unclear. Here we test the hypothesis that the redundant motor activation contributes to categorical speech perception under adverse listening conditions. In this functional magnetic resonance imaging study, participants identified one of four phon...

This study examined how talker accentedness affects the recognition of noise-vocoded speech by native English listeners and contextual information interplays with during this process. The included 20 English-speaking, normal-hearing adults aged between 19 23 years old. stimuli were Hearing in Noise Test (HINT) Revised Speech Perception (R-SPIN) sentences produced four Mandarin talkers (two male...

Children often have difficulty understanding speech in challenging listening environments. In the absence of peripheral hearing loss, these speech perception difficulties may arise from dysfunction at more central levels in the auditory system, including subcortical structures. We examined brainstem encoding of pitch in a speech syllable in 38 school-age children. In children with poor speech-i...

A prevailing complaint among individuals with sensorineural hearing loss (SNHL) is difficulty understanding speech, particularly under adverse listening conditions. The present investigation compared the speech-recognition abilities of listeners with mild to moderate degrees of SNHL to normal-hearing individuals with simulated hearing impairments, accomplished using spectrally shaped masking no...

The purpose of this study was to compare threshold-matched ears with and without suspected cochlear dead regions in terms of the speech perception benefit from high-frequency amplification. The Threshold Equalizing Noise Test (TEN) was used to assess the presence of dead regions. Speech perception was measured while participants were wearing a hearing aid fit to approximate DSL[i/o] targets. Co...

Speech reading enhances auditory perception in noise. One means by which this perceptual facilitation comes about is through information from visual networks reinforcing the encoding of the congruent speech signal by ignoring interfering acoustic signals. We tested this hypothesis neurophysiologically by acquiring EEG while individuals listened to words with a fixed portion of each word replace...

We compare automatic recognition with human perception of audio-visual speech, in the large-vocabulary, continuous speech recognition (LVCSR) domain. Specifically, we study the benefit of the visual modality for both machines and humans, when combined with audio degraded by speech-babble noise at various signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs). We first consider an automatic speechreading system with a p...

• Signal to noise ratio alone cannot represent speech quality. Speech quality perception is different in acoustic and electrical hearing. Cochlear implant users prefer softer conversational level sound. Normal hearing listeners higher are less sensitive distorted speech. Electrical by cochlear implants (CIs) may be fundamentally from the normal-hearing (NH) listeners, presumably showing unequal...

Most of the speech enhancement algorithms use the magnitude of STFT while phase is kept unchanged [3]. In this paper the magnitude of STFT of noisy speech is kept unchanged while the phase is modified. Modified complex spectrum of speech is obtained by combining unchanged magnitude spectrum and modified phase spectrum. This modification results into cancellation of low energy components (noise)...

We examined categorical speech perception in school-age children with developmental dyslexia or Specific Language Impairment (SLI), compared to age-matched and younger controls. Stimuli consisted of synthetic speech tokens in which place of articulation varied from 'b' to 'd'. Children were tested on categorization, categorization in noise, and discrimination. Phonological awareness skills were...