Intelligibility of sentences gated with a single primary rate (0.5-8 Hz, 25-75% duty cycle) or gated with an additional concurrent rate of 24 Hz and a 50% duty cycle was examined in older normal-hearing and hearing-impaired listeners. With a stronger effect of age than hearing loss, intelligibility tended to increase with primary rate and duty cycle, but varied for dual-rate gating. Reduction i...

Most current techniques for near-end speech intelligibility enhancement have focused on processing clean input signals, however, in realistic environments, the input is often noisy. Processing noisy speech for intelligibility enhancement using algorithms developed for clean signals can lower the perceptual quality of the samples when they are listened in quiet. Here we address the quality loss ...

The effect of masking due to fluctuating sources on speech intelligibility is a phenomenon difficult to predict. Intelligibility scores vary with the efficiency of the energetic masking while the linguistic content of the message and listener’s cognitive performances add to the general incertitude that peaks for the case of masking speech. The present contribution proposes a signal-based assess...

Synthetic speech can be modified to improve intelligibility in noise. In order to perform modifications automatically, it would be useful to have an objective measure that could predict the intelligibility of modified synthetic speech for human listeners. We analysed the impact on intelligibility – and on how well objective measures predict it – when we separately modify speaking rate, fundamen...

abstract background: the aim of this study was to determine the auditory performance of congenitally deaf children and the effect of cochlear implantation (ci) on speech intelligibility. methods: aprospective study was undertaken on 47 children in a pediatric tertiary referral center for ci. all children were deaf prelingually and were younger than 8 years of age. they were followed up until 5 ...

This study investigated effects, on a speech intelligibility, of asynchronicity between a speech signal and a talker’s moving image induced by time-expansion of the speech signal. First, a word intelligibility test (Exp. 1) was administered to younger listeners. Words were processed using STRAIGHT software to expand the speech signal by 0 to 400 ms. The word intelligibility test was administere...

The aim of this study was to assess the relative importance of cochlear mechanical dysfunction, temporal processing deficits, and age on the ability of hearing-impaired listeners to understand speech in noisy backgrounds. Sixty-eight listeners took part in the study. They were provided with linear, frequency-specific amplification to compensate for their audiometric losses, and intelligibility ...

BACKGROUND contextual cues intrinsic to speech stimuli can have an influence on speech intelligibility measurements; however, the influence of cues that depend on the acoustic signal, such as speech rate and vocal loudness, need further investigation. AIM to examine whether possible reductions in the articulatory rate and increase in vocal loudness, associated to the production of different s...

PURPOSE We examined variability of speech intelligibility scores and how well intelligibility scores predicted group membership among 5-year-old children with speech motor impairment (SMI) secondary to cerebral palsy and an age-matched group of typically developing (TD) children. METHOD Speech samples varying in length from 1-4 words were elicited from 24 children with cerebral palsy (mean ag...

Objective assessment of synthetic speech intelligibility can be a useful tool for the development of text-to-speech (TTS) systems, as it provides a reproducible and inexpensive alternative to subjective listening tests. In a recent work, it was shown that the intelligibility of synthetic speech could be assessed objectively by comparing two sequences of phoneme class conditional probabilities, ...