Modeling speech intelligibility with recovered envelope from temporal fine structure stimulus

2016 ◽  
Vol 81 ◽  
pp. 120-128 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fei Chen ◽  
Yu Tsao ◽  
Ying-Hui Lai
Keyword(s):  
Fine Structure ◽  
Speech Intelligibility ◽  
Temporal Fine Structure

scholarly journals Temporal fine structure influences voicing confusions for consonant identification in multi-talker babble

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vibha Viswanathan ◽  
Barbara G. Shinn-Cunningham ◽  
Michael G. Heinz
Keyword(s):  
Fine Structure ◽  
Cochlear Implants ◽  
Background Noise ◽  
Speech Intelligibility ◽  
Temporal Fine Structure ◽  
Vast Literature ◽  
Listening Environments ◽  
Intact Condition ◽  
Speech Content

To understand the mechanisms of speech perception in everyday listening environments, it is important to elucidate the relative contributions of different acoustics cues in transmitting phonetic content. Previous studies suggest that the energy envelopes of speech convey most speech content, while the temporal fine structure (TFS) can aid in segregating target speech from background noise. Despite the vast literature on TFS and speech intelligibility, the role of TFS in conveying additional speech content over what envelopes convey in complex acoustic scenes is poorly understood. The present study addresses this question using online psychophysical experiments to measure consonant identification in multi-talker babble for intelligibility-matched intact and 64-channel envelope-vocoded stimuli. Consonant confusion patterns revealed that listeners had a greater tendency in the vocoded (versus intact) condition to be biased towards reporting that they heard an unvoiced consonant, despite envelope and place cues being largely preserved. This result was replicated when babble instances were varied across independent experiments, suggesting that TFS conveys important voicing cues over what envelopes convey in multi-talker babble, a masker that is ubiquitous in everyday environments. This finding has implications for assistive listening devices that do not currently provide TFS cues, such as cochlear implants.

scholarly journals Modulation masking and fine structure shape neural envelope coding to predict speech intelligibility across diverse listening conditions

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vibha Viswanathan ◽  
Hari M Bharadwaj ◽  
Barbara G Shinn-Cunningham ◽  
Michael G Heinz
Keyword(s):  
Fine Structure ◽  
Speech Intelligibility ◽  
Speech Communication ◽  
Temporal Fine Structure ◽  
Acoustic Features ◽  
Neural Encoding ◽  
Speech Encoding ◽  
Everyday Communication ◽  
The Brain ◽  
Selection Of

A fundamental question in the neuroscience of everyday communication is how scene acoustics shape the neural processing of attended speech sounds and in turn impact speech intelligibility. While it is well known that the temporal envelopes in target speech are important for intelligibility, how the neural encoding of target-speech envelopes is influenced by background sounds or other acoustic features of the scene is unknown. Here, we combine human electroencephalography (EEG) with simultaneous intelligibility measurements to address this key gap. We find that the neural envelope-domain SNR in target-speech encoding, which is shaped by masker modulations, predicts intelligibility over a range of strategically chosen realistic listening conditions unseen by the predictive model. This provides neurophysiological evidence for modulation masking. Moreover, using high-resolution vocoding to carefully control peripheral envelopes, we show that target-envelope coding fidelity in the brain depends not only on envelopes conveyed by the cochlea, but also on the temporal fine structure (TFS), which supports scene segregation. Our results are consistent with the notion that temporal coherence of sound elements across envelopes and/or TFS influences scene analysis and attentive selection of a target sound. Our findings also inform speech intelligibility models and technologies attempting to improve real-world speech communication.

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