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Robustness of speech intelligibility at moderate levels of spectral degradation

The current study investigated how amplitude and phase information differentially contribute to speech intelligibility. Listeners performed a word-identification task after hearing spectrally degraded sentences. Each stimulus was degraded by first dividing it into segments, then the amplitude and ph...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Broussard, Sierra, Hickok, Gregory, Saberi, Kourosh
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Public Library of Science 2017
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5498061/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28678831
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0180734
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author Broussard, Sierra
Hickok, Gregory
Saberi, Kourosh
author_facet Broussard, Sierra
Hickok, Gregory
Saberi, Kourosh
author_sort Broussard, Sierra
collection PubMed
description The current study investigated how amplitude and phase information differentially contribute to speech intelligibility. Listeners performed a word-identification task after hearing spectrally degraded sentences. Each stimulus was degraded by first dividing it into segments, then the amplitude and phase components of each segment were decorrelated independently to various degrees relative to those of the original segment. Segments were then concatenated into their original sequence to present to the listener. We used three segment lengths: 30 ms (phoneme length), 250 ms (syllable length), and full sentence (non-segmented). We found that for intermediate spectral correlation values, segment length is generally inconsequential to intelligibility. Overall, intelligibility was more adversely affected by phase-spectrum decorrelation than by amplitude-spectrum decorrelation. If the phase information was left intact, decorrelating the amplitude spectrum to intermediate values had no effect on intelligibility. If the amplitude information was left intact, decorrelating the phase spectrum to intermediate values significantly degraded intelligibility. Some exceptions to this rule are described. These results delineate the range of amplitude- and phase-spectrum correlations necessary for speech processing and its dependency on the temporal window of analysis (phoneme or syllable length). Results further point to the robustness of speech information in environments that acoustically degrade cues to intelligibility (e.g., reverberant or noisy environments).
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spelling pubmed-54980612017-07-25 Robustness of speech intelligibility at moderate levels of spectral degradation Broussard, Sierra Hickok, Gregory Saberi, Kourosh PLoS One Research Article The current study investigated how amplitude and phase information differentially contribute to speech intelligibility. Listeners performed a word-identification task after hearing spectrally degraded sentences. Each stimulus was degraded by first dividing it into segments, then the amplitude and phase components of each segment were decorrelated independently to various degrees relative to those of the original segment. Segments were then concatenated into their original sequence to present to the listener. We used three segment lengths: 30 ms (phoneme length), 250 ms (syllable length), and full sentence (non-segmented). We found that for intermediate spectral correlation values, segment length is generally inconsequential to intelligibility. Overall, intelligibility was more adversely affected by phase-spectrum decorrelation than by amplitude-spectrum decorrelation. If the phase information was left intact, decorrelating the amplitude spectrum to intermediate values had no effect on intelligibility. If the amplitude information was left intact, decorrelating the phase spectrum to intermediate values significantly degraded intelligibility. Some exceptions to this rule are described. These results delineate the range of amplitude- and phase-spectrum correlations necessary for speech processing and its dependency on the temporal window of analysis (phoneme or syllable length). Results further point to the robustness of speech information in environments that acoustically degrade cues to intelligibility (e.g., reverberant or noisy environments). Public Library of Science 2017-07-05 /pmc/articles/PMC5498061/ /pubmed/28678831 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0180734 Text en © 2017 Broussard et al http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
spellingShingle Research Article
Broussard, Sierra
Hickok, Gregory
Saberi, Kourosh
Robustness of speech intelligibility at moderate levels of spectral degradation
title Robustness of speech intelligibility at moderate levels of spectral degradation
title_full Robustness of speech intelligibility at moderate levels of spectral degradation
title_fullStr Robustness of speech intelligibility at moderate levels of spectral degradation
title_full_unstemmed Robustness of speech intelligibility at moderate levels of spectral degradation
title_short Robustness of speech intelligibility at moderate levels of spectral degradation
title_sort robustness of speech intelligibility at moderate levels of spectral degradation
topic Research Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5498061/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28678831
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0180734
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