While global characteristics of the speaker’s source and spectral features have been successfully employed in pathological voice detection, the underlying text has largely been ignored. In this work, we focus on experiments that exploit the text stimulus that is read by the subject. Features derived from text include the mean cepstral distortion of the subject from an average intelligible speak...

When we speak in an environment with noise, we often modify our speech production, and speech spoken in noise is generally more intelligible than speech produced in a quiet environment, which is known as the Lombard effect. Our goal is to provide intelligible speech announcements in noisy and/or reverberant public spaces, such as train stations. Thus, the present paper examines whether speech s...

OBJECTIVE The purpose of this study was to examine whether four socioeconomic factors, namely caregiver age, caregiver education, family income and/or household size were related to the presence of motor delays or unintelligible speech in South African children with intellectual disabilities. METHODS Caregivers of children with intellectual disabilities completed a biographical questionnaire ...

High-density electroencephalography was used to evaluate cortical activity during speech comprehension via a sentence verification task. Twenty-four participants assigned true or false to sentences produced with 3 noise-vocoded channel levels (1--unintelligible, 6--decipherable, 16--intelligible), during simultaneous EEG recording. Participant data were sorted into higher- (HP) and lower-perfor...

The advent of arti0cial neural networks has contributed signi0cantly to the 0eld of knowledge engineering. Neural networks belong to a family of models that are based on a learning-by-example paradigm in which problem solving knowledge is automatically generated according to actual examples presented to them. The knowledge, however, is represented at a subsymbolic level in terms of connections ...

Standard or prestige accents (e.g., southern British RP, General American) are highly intelligible to a range of native speakers, which may be caused by listener experience (e.g., the accents are frequently heard in the media). The present study investigated the role of experience by testing Mandarin speakers with intermediate English proficiency in terms of their speech-in-noise recognition fo...

The brain network underlying speech comprehension is usually described as encompassing fronto-temporal-parietal regions while neuroimaging studies of speech intelligibility have focused on a more spatially restricted network dominated by the superior temporal cortex. Here we use functional magnetic resonance imaging with a novel whole-brain multivariate pattern analysis (MVPA) to more fully cha...