International Workshop on Frontiers in Speech and Hearing Research, Technical Report of IEICE Japan, Vol. SP2005-165, pp. 15-20, 2006
The effect of the steady-state suppression on consonant identification by native and non-native listeners in reverberant environments
N. Hodoshima, D. Behne and T. Arai
Abstract: This study investigated whether the steady-state suppression proposed by Arai et al. (Proc. Autumn Meet. Acoust. Soc. Jpn., 2001; Acoust. Sci. Tech., 2002) improved consonant identification for non-native listeners in reverberation. This study also compared the effect of steady-state suppression on consonant identification by native and non-native listeners in reverberant environments. We used steady-state suppression as a pre-processing technique which processes speech signals before they are radiated from loudspeakers in order to reduce the amount of overlap-masking. Participants were 24 native English (native listeners) and 24 Japanese speakers (non-native listeners), both with normal hearing. A diotic Modified Rhyme Test (MRT) was conducted under 2 processing conditions (with or without steady-state suppression) for 3 reverberant conditions (reverberation times of 0.4, 0.7 and 1.1 s) and a dry condition. The results showed that native listeners performed better than non-native listeners in all conditions used in this study. Although there were no significant differences between unprocessed and steady-state suppressed stimuli, and no significant interaction between the effect of the steady-state suppression and listener group under the reverberant conditions used in the current study, the effect of the steady-state suppression differed in consonant position, reverberation time and listener group. These findings imply that a pre-processing technique would be required which helps non-native listeners to identify consonants as well as native listeners do.
Keywords: Speech enhancement, Non-native listeners, Reverberation, Steady-state suppression, Speech intelligibility
International Workshop on Frontiers in Speech and Hearing Research, Technical Report of IEICE Japan, Vol. SP2005-165, pp. 15-20, 2006
The effect of the steady-state suppression on consonant identification by native and non-native listeners in reverberant environments
N. Hodoshima, D. Behne and T. Arai
Abstract: This study investigated whether the steady-state suppression proposed by Arai et al. (Proc. Autumn Meet. Acoust. Soc. Jpn., 2001; Acoust. Sci. Tech., 2002) improved consonant identification for non-native listeners in reverberation. This study also compared the effect of steady-state suppression on consonant identification by native and non-native listeners in reverberant environments. We used steady-state suppression as a pre-processing technique which processes speech signals before they are radiated from loudspeakers in order to reduce the amount of overlap-masking. Participants were 24 native English (native listeners) and 24 Japanese speakers (non-native listeners), both with normal hearing. A diotic Modified Rhyme Test (MRT) was conducted under 2 processing conditions (with or without steady-state suppression) for 3 reverberant conditions (reverberation times of 0.4, 0.7 and 1.1 s) and a dry condition. The results showed that native listeners performed better than non-native listeners in all conditions used in this study. Although there were no significant differences between unprocessed and steady-state suppressed stimuli, and no significant interaction between the effect of the steady-state suppression and listener group under the reverberant conditions used in the current study, the effect of the steady-state suppression differed in consonant position, reverberation time and listener group. These findings imply that a pre-processing technique would be required which helps non-native listeners to identify consonants as well as native listeners do.
Keywords: Speech enhancement, Non-native listeners, Reverberation, Steady-state suppression, Speech intelligibility