Spectral restoration of speech : Intelligibility is increased by inserting noise in spectral gaps

In order to function effectively as a means of communication, speech must be intelligible under the noisy conditions encountered in everyday life. Two types of perceptual synthesis have been reported that can reduce or cancel the effects of masking by extraneous sounds: Phonemic restoration can enha...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Perception & psychophysics 1997-02, Vol.59 (2), p.275-283
Main Authors: WARREN, R. M, HAINSWORTH, K. R, BRUBAKER, B. S, BASHFORD, J. A, HEALY, E. W
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adult
Biological and medical sciences
Dichotic Listening Tests
Dominance, Cerebral
Female
Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology
Humans
Language
Male
Noise
Perceptual Masking
Phonetics
Production and perception of spoken language
Psychoacoustics
Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry
Psychology. Psychophysiology
Sound Spectrography
Speech Acoustics
Speech Intelligibility
Speech Perception
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Summary:In order to function effectively as a means of communication, speech must be intelligible under the noisy conditions encountered in everyday life. Two types of perceptual synthesis have been reported that can reduce or cancel the effects of masking by extraneous sounds: Phonemic restoration can enhance intelligibility when segments are replaced or masked by noise, and contralateral induction can prevent mislateralization by effectively restoring speech masked at one ear when it is heard in the other. The present study reports a third type of perceptual synthesis induced by noise: enhancement of intelligibility produced by adding noise to spectral gaps. In most of the experiments, the speech stimuli consisted of two widely separated narrow bands of speech (center frequencies of 370 and 6,000 Hz, each band having high-pass and low-pass slopes of 115 dB/octave meeting at the center frequency). These very narrow bands effectively reduced the available information to frequency-limited patterns of amplitude fluctuation lacking information concerning formant structure and frequency transitions. When stochastic noise was introduced into the gap separating the two speech bands, intelligibility increased for "everyday" sentences, for sentences that varied in the transitional probability of keywords, and for monosyllabic word lists. Effects produced by systematically varying noise amplitude and noise bandwidth are reported, and the implications of some of the novel effects observed are discussed.
ISSN:0031-5117
1532-5962
DOI:10.3758/bf03211895