Speech production modifications produced by competing talkers, babble, and stationary noise.

Noise has an effect on speech production. Stationary noise and babble have been used in the past but the effect of a competing talker, which might be expected to cause different types of disruption, has rarely been investigated. The current study examined the acoustic and phonetic consequences of N-talker noise on sentence production for a range of values of N from 1 (competing talker) to infinity (speech-shaped noise). The effect of noise on speech production increased with both the number of background talkers (N) and noise level, both of which act to increase the energetic masking effect of the noise. In a background of stationary noise, noise-induced speech was always more intelligible than speech produced in quiet, and the gain in intelligibility increased with N and noise level, suggesting that talkers modify their productions to ameliorate energetic masking at the ears of the listener. When presented in a competing talker background, speech induced by a competing talker was more intelligible than speech produced in quiet, but the scale of the effect was compatible with the energetic masking effect of the competing talker. No evidence was found of modifications to speech production which exploited the temporal structure of a competing talker.

[1]  J. Goodman,et al.  Perceptual masking of spondees by combinations of talkers , 1975 .

[2]  Jon Barker,et al.  The foreign language cocktail party problem: Energetic and informational masking effects in non-native speech perception. , 2008, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[3]  P. Boersma.  ACCURATE SHORT-TERM ANALYSIS OF THE FUNDAMENTAL FREQUENCY AND THE HARMONICS-TO-NOISE RATIO OF A SAMPLED SOUND , 1993 .

[4]  R. Plomp,et al.  Effects of fluctuating noise and interfering speech on the speech-reception threshold for impaired and normal hearing. , 1990, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[5]  Richard L Freyman,et al.  Effect of number of masking talkers and auditory priming on informational masking in speech recognition. , 2004, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[6]  W. S. Charlip,et al.  Effects of noise on selected speech parameters , 1969 .

[7]  J C Junqua,et al.  The Lombard reflex and its role on human listeners and automatic speech recognizers. , 1993, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[8]  Jean-Claude Junqua,et al.  The influence of acoustics on speech production: A noise-induced stress phenomenon known as the Lombard reflex , 1996, Speech Commun..

[9]  John H. L. Hansen,et al.  Analysis and compensation of speech under stress and noise for environmental robustness in speech recognition , 1996, Speech Commun..

[10]  John H. L. Hansen,et al.  Morphological constrained feature enhancement with adaptive cepstral compensation (MCE-ACC) for speech recognition in noise and Lombard effect , 1994, IEEE Trans. Speech Audio Process..

[11]  S. Arlinger,et al.  Sound attenuation of TDH-39 earphones in a diffuse field of narrow-band noise. , 1986, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[12]  John H. L. Hansen,et al.  Analysis of lombard effect under different types and levels of noise with application to in-set speaker ID systems , 2006, INTERSPEECH.

[13]  T W Tillman,et al.  Perceptual masking in multiple sound backgrounds. , 1969, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[14]  T. D. Hanley,et al.  Effect of level of distracting noise upon speaking rate, duration and intensity. , 1949, The Journal of speech disorders.

[15]  John H. L. Hansen,et al.  Classification of speech under stress using target driven features , 1996, Speech Commun..

[16]  Petr Pollák,et al.  Methodology of Lombard Speech Database Acquisition: Experiences with CLSD , 2006, LREC.

[17]  Jon Barker,et al.  Modelling speaker intelligibility in noise , 2007, Speech Commun..

[18]  R A Lutfi,et al.  Effect of masker harmonicity on informational masking. , 2000, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[19]  D. Howes.  On the Relation between the Intelligibility and Frequency of Occurrence of English Words , 1957 .

[20]  Z S Bond,et al.  Acoustic-phonetic characteristics of speech produced in noise and while wearing an oxygen mask. , 1989, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[21]  B. Shinn-Cunningham,et al.  Note on informational masking (L) , 2003 .

[22]  Yi Xu,et al.  Compensation for pitch-shifted auditory feedback during the production of Mandarin tone sequences. , 2004, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[23]  D L Neff.  Signal properties that reduce masking by simultaneous, random-frequency maskers. , 1995, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[24]  H. Lane,et al.  The Lombard Sign and the Role of Hearing in Speech , 1971 .

[25]  Francine R. Chen,et al.  Acoustic characteristics and intelligibility of clear and conversational speech at the segmental level , 1980 .

[26]  B. Lindblom,et al.  Acoustical consequences of lip, tongue, jaw, and larynx movement. , 1970, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[27]  Bernard S. Lee.  Effects of delayed speech feedback , 1950 .

[28]  K. Kalveram,et al.  Effects of frequency-shifted auditory feedback on fundamental frequency of long stressed and unstressed syllables. , 2001, Journal of speech, language, and hearing research : JSLHR.

[29]  G. Kidd,et al.  Similarity, uncertainty, and masking in the identification of nonspeech auditory patterns. , 2002, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[30]  J J O'NEILL,et al.  Effects of ambient noise on speaker intelligibility of words and phrases , 1958, The Laryngoscope.

[31]  R. H. Bernacki,et al.  Effects of noise on speech production: acoustic and perceptual analyses. , 1988, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[32]  Jon Barker,et al.  An audio-visual corpus for speech perception and automatic speech recognition. , 2006, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[33]  R. G. Klumpp,et al.  Effects of Ambient Noise and Nearby Talkers on a Face‐to‐Face Communication Task , 1962 .

[34]  John H. L. Hansen,et al.  Lombard effect compensation for robust automatic speech recognition in noise , 1990, ICSLP.

[35]  T Letowski,et al.  Acoustical Properties of Speech Produced in Noise Presented Through Supra‐Aural Earphones , 1993, Ear and hearing.

[36]  R Plomp,et al.  Effect of multiple speechlike maskers on binaural speech recognition in normal and impaired hearing. , 1992, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[37]  Björn Lindblom,et al.  Explaining Phonetic Variation: A Sketch of the H&H Theory , 1990 .

[38]  David B. Pisoni,et al.  Some acoustic-phonetic correlates of speech produced in noise , 1985, ICASSP '85. IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing.

[39]  R. Patel,et al.  The influence of linguistic content on the Lombard effect. , 2008, Journal of speech, language, and hearing research : JSLHR.

[40]  J. C. Krause,et al.  Acoustic properties of naturally produced clear speech at normal speaking rates. , 1996, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[41]  J. Kalinowski,et al.  Effect of delayed auditory feedback on normal speakers at two speech rates. , 2002, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[42]  M. Picheny,et al.  Speaking clearly for the hard of hearing. II: Acoustic characteristics of clear and conversational speech. , 1986, Journal of speech and hearing research.

[43]  M. Cooke,et al.  Consonant identification in N-talker babble is a nonmonotonic function of N. , 2005, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[44]  Martin Cooke,et al.  A glimpsing model of speech perception in noise. , 2006, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[45]  T. Wiley,et al.  Recognition of speech produced in noise. , 2001, Journal of speech, language, and hearing research : JSLHR.

[46]  Ann R Bradlow,et al.  Production and perception of clear speech in Croatian and English. , 2004, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[47]  J. Sundberg,et al.  Relationship between changes in voice pitch and loudness , 1988 .

[48]  B. J. Stanton,et al.  Acoustic-phonetic analysis of loud and Lombard speech in simulated cockpit conditions , 1988, ICASSP-88., International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing.

[49]  P. Boersma.  Praat : doing phonetics by computer (version 4.4.24) , 2006 .

[50]  J. M. Pickett,et al.  Effects of Vocal Force on the Intelligibility of Speech Sounds , 1956 .

[51]  Yung-Hwan Oh,et al.  Lombard effect compensation and noise suppression for noisy Lombard speech recognition , 1996, Proceeding of Fourth International Conference on Spoken Language Processing. ICSLP '96.

[52]  Marion Dohen,et al.  An acoustic and articulatory study of Lombard speech: global effects on the utterance , 2006, INTERSPEECH.

[53]  Jean-Claude Junqua,et al.  A duration study of speech vowels produced in noise , 1994, ICSLP.

[54]  John H. L. Hansen,et al.  Speech under stress conditions: overview of the effect on speech production and on system performance , 1999, 1999 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing. Proceedings. ICASSP99 (Cat. No.99CH36258).

[55]  Jean-Claude Junqua,et al.  The Lombard effect: a reflex to better communicate with others in noise , 1999, 1999 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing. Proceedings. ICASSP99 (Cat. No.99CH36258).

[56]  Jean-Claude Junqua,et al.  Influence of the speaking style and the noise spectral tilt on the lombard reflex and automatic speech recognition , 1998, ICSLP.

[57]  V C Tartter,et al.  Some acoustic effects of listening to noise on speech production. , 1993, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[58]  D S Brungart,et al.  Informational and energetic masking effects in the perception of two simultaneous talkers. , 2001, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.