Improving consonant identification in noise and reverberation by steady-state suppression as a preprocessing approach

Noise (N), reverberation (R), and a combination of N and R (NR) differently degrade speech intelligibility. The current study aims to improve speech intelligibility in public spaces by processing speech signals through public address systems (a preprocessing approach). As a preprocessing approach, we proposed steady-state suppression, and it has improved consonant identification in R. The current study tests the effect of steady-state suppression in N, R, and NR at three signal to noise ratios and at reverberation time of 0.9 s. Results showed that steady-state suppression significantly improved consonant identification by 21 young people in NR and in R. Furthermore, steady-state suppression improved consonant identification more in NR than in R. The results indicate that steady-state suppression may be applicable to public spaces having N and R. The results also indicate that an integration of N and R improves the performance of a preprocessing approach in a certain range of N and R.

[1]  Keisuke Kinoshita,et al.  Effects of suppressing steady-state portions of speech on intelligibility in reverberant environments , 2002 .

[2]  C. Crandell,et al.  Classroom Acoustics for Children With Normal Hearing and With Hearing Impairment. , 2000, Language, speech, and hearing services in schools.

[3]  Takayuki Arai,et al.  A preprocessing technique for improving speech intelligibility in reverberant environments: the effect of steady-state suppression on elderly people , 2005, INTERSPEECH.

[4]  Herman J. M. Steeneken,et al.  Assessment for automatic speech recognition: II. NOISEX-92: A database and an experiment to study the effect of additive noise on speech recognition systems , 1993, Speech Commun..

[5]  Takayuki Arai,et al.  The effect of pre-processing approach for improving speech intelligibility in a hall: Comparison between diotic and dichotic listening conditions , 2005 .

[6]  V. Hazan,et al.  The Effect of Cue-Enhancement on Consonant Intelligibility in Noise: Speaker and Listener Effects , 2000, Language and speech.

[7]  R. H. Bolt,et al.  Theory of Speech masking by reverberation , 1949 .

[8]  A. Nabelek,et al.  Reverberant overlap- and self-masking in consonant identification. , 1989, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[9]  Hiroshi Sato,et al.  EXPERIMENTAL STUDY ON EVALUATION OF EFFECT OF REVERVERATION AND NOISE ON SPEECH INTELLIGIBILITY ON ROOMS , 1996 .

[10]  S. Furui.  On the role of spectral transition for speech perception. , 1986, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[11]  J S Bradley,et al.  On the combined effects of signal-to-noise ratio and room acoustics on speech intelligibility. , 1999, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[12]  J. Pickett,et al.  Monaural and binaural speech perception through hearing aids under noise and reverberation with normal and hearing-impaired listeners. , 1974, Journal of speech and hearing research.

[13]  A. J. Watkins,et al.  The influence of early reflections on the identification and lateralization of vowels. , 1999, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[14]  Keisuke Kinoshita,et al.  Improving syllable identification by a preprocessing method reducing overlap-masking in reverberant environments. , 2006, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.