This study presents the assessment of the quality of speech intelligibility of two Malaysian mosques and the results are used to develop a set of general acoustical guidelines to be used in the design of a mosque. Two mosques were selected for the research: Masjid UPM and the Masjid Jamek. The objective of the research is to enable the comparison of the acoustics and speech intelligibility betw...

Understanding low-intelligibility speech is effortful. In three experiments, we examined the effects of intelligibility on working memory (WM) demands imposed by perception of synthetic speech. In all three experiments, a primary speeded word recognition task was paired with a secondary WM-load task designed to vary the availability of WM capacity during speech perception. Speech intelligibilit...

Speech intelligibility prediction methods are popular tools within the speech processing community for objective evaluation of speech intelligibility of e.g. enhanced speech. The Short-Time Objective Intelligibility (STOI) measure has become highly used due to its simplicity and high prediction accuracy. In this paper we investigate the use of Band Importance Functions (BIFs) in the STOI measur...

In this study, the use of alternative acoustic sensors in human-robot communication is investigated. In particular, a Non-Audible Murmur (NAM) microphone was applied in teleoperating Geminoid HI-1 robot in noisy environments. The current study introduces the methodology and the results of speech intelligibility subjective tests when a NAM microphone was used in comparison with using a standard ...

In this paper the question is addressed whether the word-level intelligibility of time-compressed speech can be improved over linear compression by using a type of non-linear compression. Two options are tested: one type of compression which takes into account the natural timing of fast speech; and one other type of compression that saves the segmental intelligibility of short unstressed syllab...

The purpose of this study was to identify any differences between speech intelligibility measures obtained with MineEars electronic earmuffs (ProEars, Westcliffe, CO, USA) and the Bilsom model 847 (Sperian Hearing Protection, San Diego, CA, USA), which is a conventional passive-attenuation earmuff. These two devices are closely related, since the MineEars device consisted of a Bilsom 847 earmuf...

Many children with Down syndrome have difficulty with speech intelligibility. The present study used a parent survey to learn more about a specific factor that affects speech intelligibility, i.e. childhood verbal apraxia. One of the factors that affects speech intelligibility for children with Down syndrome is difficulty with voluntarily programming, combining, organising, and sequencing the m...

This study used a multi-talker database containing intelligibility scores for 2000 sentences (20 talkers, 100 sentences), to identify talker-related correlates of speech intelligibility. We first investigated "global" talker characteristics (e.g., gender, F0 and speaking rate). Findings showed female talkers to be more intelligible as a group than male talkers. Additionally, we found a tendency...

Clear speech is a speaking style adopted by speakers in an attempt to maximize the clarity of their speech and is proven to be more intelligible than casual speech. This work focuses on modifying casual speech to sound as intelligible as clear speech. First, we examine the role of speaking rate for intelligibility. Clear and casual speech signals are time-scale stretched, matching the average d...

PURPOSE Given the potential significance of speech naturalness to functional and social rehabilitation outcomes, the objective of this study was to examine the effect of listener perceptions of monopitch on speech naturalness and intelligibility in individuals with Parkinson's disease (PD). METHOD Two short utterances were extracted from monologue samples of 16 speakers with PD and 5 age-matc...