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...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 2008-11, Vol.124 (5), p.3261-3275
Main Authors: Lu, Youyi, Cooke, Martin
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Acoustics
Biological and medical sciences
Ear - physiology
Ear and associated structures. Auditory pathways and centers. Hearing. Vocal organ. Phonation. Sound production. Echolocation
Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology
Hearing - physiology
Humans
Noise
Perceptual Masking
Phonetics
Speech
Speech Intelligibility
Vertebrates: nervous system and sense organs
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Summary: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.
ISSN:0001-4966
1520-8524
DOI:10.1121/1.2990705