Cantonese tone recognition with enhanced temporal periodicity cues.

This study investigated the contributions of temporal periodicity cues and the effectiveness of enhancing these cues for Cantonese tone recognition in noise. A multichannel noise-excited vocoder was used to simulate speech processing in cochlear implants. Ten normal-hearing listeners were tested. Temporal envelope and periodicity cues (TEPCs) below 500 Hz were extracted from four frequency bands: 60-500, 500-1000, 1000-2000, and 2000-4000 Hz. The test stimuli were obtained by combining TEPC-modulated noise signals from individual bands. For periodicity enhancement, temporal fluctuations in the range 20-500 Hz were replaced by a sinusoid with frequency equal to the fundamental frequency of original speech. Tone identification experiments were carried out using disyllabic word carriers. Results showed that TEPCs from the two high-frequency bands were more important for tone identification than TEPCs from the low-frequency bands. The use of periodicity-enhanced TEPCs led to consistent improvement of tone identification accuracy. The improvement was more significant at low signal-to-noise ratios, and more noticeable for female than for male voices. Analysis of error distributions showed that the enhancement method reduced tone identification errors and did not show any negative effect on the recognition of segmental structures.

[1]  Hugh J. McDermott,et al.  Pitch ranking ability of cochlear implant recipients: a comparison of sound-processing strategies. , 2005, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[2]  S. Rosen.  Temporal information in speech: acoustic, auditory and linguistic aspects. , 1992, Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences.

[3]  Georg v. Békésy,et al.  Hearing Theories and Complex Sounds , 1963 .

[4]  H J McDermott,et al.  Pitch matching of amplitude-modulated current pulse trains by cochlear implantees: the effect of modulation depth. , 1995, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[5]  Tara L Whitehill,et al.  Effect of intonation on cantonese lexical tones. , 2006, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[6]  Stuart Rosen,et al.  Enhancing temporal cues to voice pitch in continuous interleaved sampling cochlear implants. , 2004, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[7]  William M. Rabinowitz,et al.  Better speech recognition with cochlear implants , 1991, Nature.

[8]  Michael K. Qin,et al.  Effects of Envelope-Vocoder Processing on F0 Discrimination and Concurrent-Vowel Identification , 2005, Ear and hearing.

[9]  Meng Yuan,et al.  Frequency-Specific Temporal Envelope and Periodicity Components for Lexical Tone Identification in Cantonese , 2007, Ear and hearing.

[10]  Shangkai Gao,et al.  A novel speech-processing strategy incorporating tonal information for cochlear implants , 2004, IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering.

[11]  Robert V. Shannon,et al.  Importance of tonal envelope cues in Chinese speech recognition , 1995 .

[12]  Alexander L. Francis,et al.  The perception of Cantonese lexical tones by early-deafened cochlear implantees. , 2002, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[13]  M. Dorman,et al.  Speech intelligibility as a function of the number of channels of stimulation for signal processors using sine-wave and noise-band outputs. , 1997, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[14]  Fan-Gang Zeng,et al.  Mandarin tone recognition in cochlear-implant subjects , 2004, Hearing Research.

[15]  Tan Lee,et al.  Tone recognition in continuous Cantonese speech using supratone models. , 2007, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[16]  A. Cutler,et al.  Lexical tone in Cantonese spoken-word processing , 1997, Perception & psychophysics.

[17]  Andrew E. Vandali,et al.  New cochlear implant coding strategy for tonal language speakers , 2008, International journal of audiology.

[18]  Marc Moonen,et al.  Improved Music Perception with Explicit Pitch Coding in Cochlear Implants , 2006, Audiology and Neurotology.

[19]  F. Zeng,et al.  Speech recognition with altered spectral distribution of envelope cues. , 1996, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[20]  F. Zeng,et al.  Identification of temporal envelope cues in Chinese tone recognition , 2000 .

[21]  Bryan E Pfingst,et al.  Features of stimulation affecting tonal-speech perception: implications for cochlear prostheses. , 2002, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[22]  G. Studebaker.  A "rationalized" arcsine transform. , 1985, Journal of speech and hearing research.

[23]  S. Chiu,et al.  Tone perception ability of Cantonese-speaking children. , 2002 .

[24]  Frédéric Berthommier,et al.  Effects of envelope expansion on speech recognition , 1999, Hearing Research.

[25]  R V Shannon,et al.  Speech Recognition with Primarily Temporal Cues , 1995, Science.

[26]  H J McDermott,et al.  Pitch percepts associated with amplitude-modulated current pulse trains in cochlear implantees. , 1994, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[27]  B C Moore,et al.  Pitch discrimination and phase sensitivity in young and elderly subjects and its relationship to frequency selectivity. , 1992, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[28]  D. Au.  Effects of stimulation rates on Cantonese lexical tone perception by cochlear implant users in Hong Kong. , 2003, Clinical otolaryngology and allied sciences.

[29]  Ying-Yee Kong,et al.  Temporal and spectral cues in Mandarin tone recognition , 2004 .

[30]  Stuart Rosen,et al.  Spectral and temporal cues to pitch in noise-excited vocoder simulations of continuous-interleaved-sampling cochlear implants. , 2002, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[31]  Marc Moonen,et al.  Factors affecting the use of noise-band vocoders as acoustic models for pitch perception in cochlear implants. , 2006, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[32]  L Geurts,et al.  Coding of the fundamental frequency in continuous interleaved sampling processors for cochlear implants. , 2001, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[33]  D H Whalen,et al.  Information for Mandarin Tones in the Amplitude Contour and in Brief Segments , 1990, Phonetica.

[34]  Yi Xu.  Contextual tonal variations in Mandarin , 1997 .

[35]  R. Shannon,et al.  Effect of stimulation rate on phoneme recognition by nucleus-22 cochlear implant listeners. , 2000, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.