The cocktail-party problem revisited: Early processing and selection of multi-talker speech

How do we recognize what one person is saying when others are speaking at the same time? This review summarizes widespread research in psychoacoustics, auditory scene analysis, and attention, all dealing with early processing and selection of speech, which has been stimulated by this question. Important effects occurring at the peripheral and...

Attention and the multiple stages of multisensory integration: A review of audiovisual studies

Multisensory integration and crossmodal attention have a large impact on how we perceive the world. Therefore, it is important to know under what circumstances these processes take place and how they affect our performance. So far, no consensus has been reached on whether multisensory integration and crossmodal attention operate independently...

User evaluation of a communication system that automatically generates captions to improve telephone communication

This study examined the subjective benefit obtained from automatically generated captions during telephone-speech comprehension in the presence of babble noise. Short stories were presented by telephone either with or without captions that were generated offline by an automatic speech recognition (ASR) system. To simulate online ASR, the word...

Binaural intelligibility prediction based on the speech transmission index

Although the speech transmission index STI is a well-accepted and standardized method for objective prediction of speech intelligibility in a wide range of environments and applications, it is essentially a monaural model. Advantages of binaural hearing in speech intelligibility are disregarded. In specific conditions, this leads to considerable...

The benefit obtained from visually displayed text from an automatic speech recognizer during listening to speech presented in noise

OBJECTIVES: The aim of this study was to evaluate the benefit that listeners obtain from visually presented output from an automatic speech recognition (ASR) system during listening to speech in noise. DESIGN: Auditory-alone and audiovisual speech reception thresholds (SRTs) were measured. The SRT is defined as the speech-to-noise ratio at which...

Using the Speech Transmission Index for predicting non-native speech intelligibility

While the Speech Transmission Index ~STI! is widely applied for prediction of speech intelligibility in room acoustics and telecommunication engineering, it is unclear how to interpret STI values when non-native talkers or listeners are involved. Based on subjectively measured psychometric functions for sentence intelligibility in noise, for...

Effect of talker and speaking style on the Speech Transmission Index (L)

The Speech Transmission Index (STI) is routinely applied for predicting the intelligibility of messages (sentences) in noise and reverberation. Despite clear evidence that the STI is capable of doing so accurately, recent results indicate that the STI sometimes underestimates the effect of reverberation on sentence intelligibility. To...

Quantifying the intelligibility of speech in noise for non-native listeners

Evaluation of context effects in sentence recognition

It was investigated whether the model for context effects, developed earlier by Bronkhorst et al. [J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 93, 499-509 (1993)], can be applied to results of sentence tests, used for the evaluation of speech recognition. Data for two German sentence tests, that differed with respect to their semantic content, were analyzed. They had...

Quantifying the intelligibility of speech in noise for non-native listeners

When listening to languages learned at a later age, speech intelligibility is generally lower than when listening to one's native language. The main purpose of this study is to quantify speech intelligibility in noise for specific populations of non-native listeners, only broadly addressing the underlying perceptual and linguistic processing. An...