Effect of Competition, Signal-to-Noise Ratio, Race, and Sex on Southern American English Dialect Talkers’ Sentence Recognition

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Stuart ◽  
Yolanda F. Holt ◽  
Alyssa N. Kerls ◽  
Madeline R. Smith
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Speech Perception ◽  
Signal To Noise Ratio ◽  
American English ◽  
Broadband Noise ◽  
Signal To Noise ◽  
English Sentence ◽  
Sentence Recognition ◽  
Open Set ◽  
Noise Ratio

Background: Although numerous studies have examined regional and racial–ethnic labeling of talkeridentity, few have evaluated speech perception skills of listeners from the southern United States.Purpose: The objective of the study was to examine the effect of competition, signal-to-noise ratio(SNR), race, and sex on sentence recognition performance in talkers from the Southern American Englishdialect region.Research Design: A four-factor mixed-measures design was used.Study Sample: Forty-eight normal-hearing young African American and White adults participated.Data Collection and Analyses: The Perceptually Robust English Sentence Test Open-set was used inquiet and in continuous and interrupted noise and multitalker babble at SNRs of -10, -5, 0, and 5 dB.Results: Significant main effects of competition (p < 0.001) and SNR (p < 0.001) and a competition bySNR interaction were found (p < 0.001). Performance improved with increasing SNRs. Performance wasalso greater in the interrupted broadband noise at poorer SNRs, relative to the other competitors. Multitalkerbabble performance was significantly poorer than the continuous noise at the poorer SNRs. Therewas no effect of race or sex on performance in quiet or competition.Conclusions: Although African American English and White American English talkers living in the samegeographic region demonstrate differences in speech production, their speech perception in noise doesnot appear to differ under the conditions examined in this study.

Importance of time-frequency units for sentence recognition as a function of signal-to-noise ratio

2018 ◽  
Vol 143 (3) ◽  
pp. 1751-1751 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frederic Apoux ◽  
Brittney Carter ◽  
Karl P. Velik ◽  
Eric Healy
Keyword(s):  
Signal To Noise Ratio ◽  
Signal To Noise ◽  
Time Frequency ◽  
Sentence Recognition ◽  
Noise Ratio

Effects of Adaptive Hearing Aid Directionality and Noise Reduction on Masked Speech Recognition for Children Who Are Hard of Hearing

2019 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 101-113 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jenna M. Browning ◽  
Emily Buss ◽  
Mary Flaherty ◽  
Tim Vallier ◽  
Lori J. Leibold
Keyword(s):  
Speech Recognition ◽  
Hearing Aids ◽  
Hard Of Hearing ◽  
Signal To Noise Ratio ◽  
Hearing Aid ◽  
Normal Hearing ◽  
Signal To Noise ◽  
Open Set ◽  
Fully Adaptive ◽  
Noise Ratio

Purpose The purpose of this study was to evaluate speech-in-noise and speech-in-speech recognition associated with activation of a fully adaptive directional hearing aid algorithm in children with mild to severe bilateral sensory/neural hearing loss. Method Fourteen children (5–14 years old) who are hard of hearing participated in this study. Participants wore laboratory hearing aids. Open-set word recognition thresholds were measured adaptively for 2 hearing aid settings: (a) omnidirectional (OMNI) and (b) fully adaptive directionality. Each hearing aid setting was evaluated in 3 listening conditions. Fourteen children with normal hearing served as age-matched controls. Results Children who are hard of hearing required a more advantageous signal-to-noise ratio than children with normal hearing to achieve comparable performance in all 3 conditions. For children who are hard of hearing, the average improvement in signal-to-noise ratio when comparing fully adaptive directionality to OMNI was 4.0 dB in noise, regardless of target location. Children performed similarly with fully adaptive directionality and OMNI settings in the presence of the speech maskers. Conclusions Compared to OMNI, fully adaptive directionality improved speech recognition in steady noise for children who are hard of hearing, even when they were not facing the target source. This algorithm did not affect speech recognition when the background noise was speech. Although the use of hearing aids with fully adaptive directionality is not proposed as a substitute for remote microphone systems, it appears to offer several advantages over fixed directionality, because it does not depend on children facing the target talker and provides access to multiple talkers within the environment. Additional experiments are required to further evaluate children's performance under a variety of spatial configurations in the presence of both noise and speech maskers.

scholarly journals Output signal-to-noise ratio and speech perception in noise: effects of algorithm

2017 ◽  
Vol 56 (8) ◽  
pp. 568-579 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christi W. Miller ◽  
Ruth A. Bentler ◽  
Yu-Hsiang Wu ◽  
James Lewis ◽  
Kelly Tremblay
Keyword(s):  
Speech Perception ◽  
Output Signal ◽  
Signal To Noise Ratio ◽  
Signal To Noise ◽  
Speech Perception In Noise ◽  
Noise Effects ◽  
Noise Ratio

scholarly journals Masking Release and Modulation Interference in Cochlear Implant and Simulation Listeners

2013 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 135-146 ◽  
Author(s):  
Su-Hyun Jin ◽  
Yingjiu Nie ◽  
Peggy Nelson
Keyword(s):  
Speech Perception ◽  
Cochlear Implants ◽  
Training Programs ◽  
Signal To Noise Ratio ◽  
Spectral Interference ◽  
Signal To Noise ◽  
Sentence Recognition ◽  
Speech In Noise ◽  
Masking Release ◽  
Masking Noise

Purpose To examine the effects of temporal and spectral interference of masking noise on sentence recognition for listeners with cochlear implants (CI) and normal-hearing persons listening to vocoded signals that simulate signals processed through a CI (NH-Sim). Method NH-Sim and CI listeners participated in the experiments using speech and noise that were processed by bandpass filters. Depending on the experimental condition, the spectra of the maskers relative to that of speech were set to be completely embedded with, partially overlapping, or completely separate from, the speech. The maskers were either steady or amplitude modulated and were presented at +10 dB signal-to-noise ratio. Results NH-Sim listeners experienced progressively more masking as the masker became more spectrally overlapping with speech, whereas CI listeners experienced masking even when the masker was spectrally remote from the speech signal. Both the NH-Sim and CI listeners experienced significant modulation interference when noise was modulated at a syllabic rate (4 Hz), suggesting that listeners may experience both modulation interference and masking release. Thus, modulated noise has mixed and counteracting effects on speech perception. Conclusion When the NH-Sim and CI listeners with poor spectral resolution were tested using syllabic-like rates of modulated noise, they tended to integrate or confuse the noise with the speech, causing an increase in speech errors. Optional training programs might be useful for CI listeners who show more difficulty understanding speech in noise.

scholarly journals List Equivalency of PRESTO for the Evaluation of Speech Recognition

2015 ◽  
Vol 26 (06) ◽  
pp. 582-594 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathleen F. Faulkner ◽  
Terrin N. Tamati ◽  
Jaimie L. Gilbert ◽  
David B. Pisoni
Keyword(s):  
Speech Recognition ◽  
Undergraduate Students ◽  
Signal To Noise Ratio ◽  
Spoken Word Recognition ◽  
Recognition Task ◽  
Clinical Test ◽  
English Sentence ◽  
Sentence Recognition ◽  
Open Set ◽  
Regional Dialect

Background: There is a pressing clinical need for the development of ecologically valid and robust assessment measures of speech recognition. Perceptually Robust English Sentence Test Open-set (PRESTO) is a new high-variability sentence recognition test that is sensitive to individual differences and was designed for use with several different clinical populations. PRESTO differs from other sentence recognition tests because the target sentences differ in talker, gender, and regional dialect. Increasing interest in using PRESTO as a clinical test of spoken word recognition dictates the need to establish equivalence across test lists. Purpose: The purpose of this study was to establish list equivalency of PRESTO for clinical use. Research Design: PRESTO sentence lists were presented to three groups of normal-hearing listeners in noise (multitalker babble [MTB] at 0 dB signal-to-noise ratio) or under eight-channel cochlear implant simulation (CI-Sim). Study Sample: Ninety-one young native speakers of English who were undergraduate students from the Indiana University community participated in this study. Data Collection and Analysis: Participants completed a sentence recognition task using different PRESTO sentence lists. They listened to sentences presented over headphones and typed in the words they heard on a computer. Keyword scoring was completed offline. Equivalency for sentence lists was determined based on the list intelligibility (mean keyword accuracy for each list compared with all other lists) and listener consistency (the relation between mean keyword accuracy on each list for each listener). Results: Based on measures of list equivalency and listener consistency, ten PRESTO lists were found to be equivalent in the MTB condition, nine lists were equivalent in the CI-Sim condition, and six PRESTO lists were equivalent in both conditions. Conclusions: PRESTO is a valuable addition to the clinical toolbox for assessing sentence recognition across different populations. Because the test condition influenced the overall intelligibility of lists, researchers and clinicians should take the presentation conditions into consideration when selecting the best PRESTO lists for their research or clinical protocols.

scholarly journals Interleaved Acoustic Environments: Impact of an Auditory Scene Classification Procedure on Speech Perception in Cochlear Implant Users

2021 ◽  
Vol 25 ◽  
pp. 233121652110141
Author(s):  
Anja Eichenauer ◽  
Uwe Baumann ◽  
Timo Stöver ◽  
Tobias Weissgerber
Keyword(s):  
Speech Perception ◽  
Cochlear Implant ◽  
Signal To Noise Ratio ◽  
Scene Classification ◽  
Signal To Noise ◽  
Acoustic Environment ◽  
The Mean ◽  
Noise Ratio ◽  
Acoustic Environments ◽  
The Impact

Clinical speech perception tests with simple presentation conditions often overestimate the impact of signal preprocessing on speech perception in complex listening environments. A new procedure was developed to assess speech perception in interleaved acoustic environments of different complexity that allows investigation of the impact of an automatic scene classification (ASC) algorithm on speech perception. The procedure was applied in cohorts of normal hearing (NH) controls and uni- and bilateral cochlear implant (CI) users. Speech reception thresholds (SRTs) were measured by means of a matrix sentence test in five acoustic environments that included different noise conditions (amplitude modulated and continuous), two spatial configurations, and reverberation. The acoustic environments were encapsulated in a randomized, mixed order single experimental run. Acoustic room simulation was played back with a loudspeaker auralization setup with 128 loudspeakers. 18 NH, 16 unilateral, and 16 bilateral CI users participated. SRTs were evaluated for each individual acoustic environment and as mean-SRT. Mean-SRTs improved by 2.4 dB signal-to-noise ratio for unilateral and 1.3 dB signal-to-noise ratio for bilateral CI users with activated ASC. Without ASC, the mean-SRT of bilateral CI users was 3.7 dB better than the SRT of unilateral CI users. The mean-SRT indicated significant differences, with NH group performing best and unilateral CI users performing worse with a difference of up to 13 dB compared to NH. The proposed speech test procedure successfully demonstrated that speech perception and benefit with ASC depend on the acoustic environment.

scholarly journals Cochlear Implant Microphone Location Affects Speech Recognition in Diffuse Noise

2015 ◽  
Vol 26 (01) ◽  
pp. 051-058 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth R. Kolberg ◽  
Sterling W. Sheffield ◽  
Timothy J. Davis ◽  
Linsey W. Sunderhaus ◽  
René H. Gifford
Keyword(s):  
Speech Recognition ◽  
Repeated Measures ◽  
Signal To Noise Ratio ◽  
Broadband Noise ◽  
Massachusetts Institute Of Technology ◽  
Signal To Noise ◽  
Stanford Research Institute ◽  
Noise Ratio ◽  
Institute Of Technology ◽  
Diffuse Noise

Background: Despite improvements in cochlear implants (CIs), CI recipients continue to experience significant communicative difficulty in background noise. Many potential solutions have been proposed to help increase signal-to-noise ratio in noisy environments, including signal processing and external accessories. To date, however, the effect of microphone location on speech recognition in noise has focused primarily on hearing aid users. Purpose: The purpose of this study was to (1) measure physical output for the T-Mic as compared with the integrated behind-the-ear (BTE) processor mic for various source azimuths, and (2) to investigate the effect of CI processor mic location for speech recognition in semi-diffuse noise with speech originating from various source azimuths as encountered in everyday communicative environments. Research Design: A repeated-measures, within-participant design was used to compare performance across listening conditions. Study Sample: A total of 11 adults with Advanced Bionics CIs were recruited for this study. Data Collection and Analysis: Physical acoustic output was measured on a Knowles Experimental Mannequin for Acoustic Research (KEMAR) for the T-Mic and BTE mic, with broadband noise presented at 0 and 90° (directed toward the implant processor). In addition to physical acoustic measurements, we also assessed recognition of sentences constructed by researchers at Texas Instruments, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the Stanford Research Institute (TIMIT sentences) at 60 dBA for speech source azimuths of 0, 90, and 270°. Sentences were presented in a semi-diffuse restaurant noise originating from the R-SPACE 8-loudspeaker array. Signal-to-noise ratio was determined individually to achieve approximately 50% correct in the unilateral implanted listening condition with speech at 0°. Performance was compared across the T-Mic, 50/50, and the integrated BTE processor mic. Results: The integrated BTE mic provided approximately 5 dB attenuation from 1500–4500 Hz for signals presented at 0° as compared with 90° (directed toward the processor). The T-Mic output was essentially equivalent for sources originating from 0 and 90°. Mic location also significantly affected sentence recognition as a function of source azimuth, with the T-Mic yielding the highest performance for speech originating from 0°. Conclusions: These results have clinical implications for (1) future implant processor design with respect to mic location, (2) mic settings for implant recipients, and (3) execution of advanced speech testing in the clinic.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document