Hybridizing conversational and clear speech

Akiko Kusumoto, Alexander B. Kain, John Paul Hosom, Jan P.H. Van Santen

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

"Clear" (CLR) speech is a speaking style that speakers adopt to be understood correctly in a difficult communication environment. Studies have shown that CLR speech, as opposed to "conversational" (cnv) speech, has significantly higher intelligibility in various conditions. While many differences in acoustic features have been identified, it is not known which individual feature or combinations of features cause the higher intelligibility of CLR speech. The objectives of the current study are to examine whether it is possible to improve speech intelligibility by approximating CLR speech features and to determine which acoustic features contribute to intelligibility. Our approach creates speech samples that combine acoustic features of CNV and CLR speech, using a hybridization algorithm. Results with normalhearing listeners showed significant sentence-level intelligibility improvements of 11-23% over CNV speech when replacing certain acoustic features with those from CLR speech.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationInternational Speech Communication Association - 8th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association, Interspeech 2007
PublisherUnavailable
Pages161-164
Number of pages4
ISBN (Print)9781605603162
StatePublished - 2007
Event8th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association, Interspeech 2007 - Antwerp, Belgium
Duration: Aug 27 2007Aug 31 2007

Publication series

NameInternational Speech Communication Association - 8th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association, Interspeech 2007
Volume1
ISSN (Electronic)1990-9772

Other

Other8th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association, Interspeech 2007
Country/TerritoryBelgium
CityAntwerp
Period8/27/078/31/07

Keywords

  • Hearing aids
  • Speech communication
  • Speech intelligibility
  • Speech processing

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Computer Science Applications
  • Software
  • Modeling and Simulation
  • Linguistics and Language
  • Communication

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