Can envelope recovery account for speech recognition based on temporal fine structure?

Braida

et al. 2015

Narrowband speech can be separated into fast temporal cues [temporal fine structure (TFS)], and slow amplitude modulations (envelope). Speech processed to contain only TFS leads to envelope recovery through cochlear filtering, which has been suggested to account for TFS-speech intelligibility for normal-hearing listeners. Hearing-impaired listeners have deficits with TFS-speech identification, but the contribution of recovered-envelope cues to these deficits is unknown. This was assessed for hearing-impaired listeners by measuring identification of disyllables processed to contain TFS or recovered-envelope cues. Hearing-impaired listeners performed worse than normalhearing listeners, but TFS-speech intelligibility was accounted for by recovered-envelope cues for both groups.

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 66%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The role of recovered envelope cues in the identification of temporal-fine-structure speech for hearing-impaired listeners

Léger

Braida

et al. 2015

“…Second, it is possible that the RENVs were internally smeared due to the broadened auditory bands associated with cochlear hearing loss and thus led to fewer independent usable ENVs (e.g., Baskent, 2006;Swaminathan and Heinz, 2012;Lorenzi et al, 2012). Third, the RENV cues may have been corrupted by the amplification of noise during the generation of TFS speech (see Apoux et al, 2013). Future work will explore strategies for presenting artificially recovered ENV cues to HI listeners in a manner that is more accessible.…”

Section: Role Of Renvs In Perception Of Tfs Speechmentioning

confidence: 99%

Consonant identification in noise using Hilbert-transform temporal fine-structure speech and recovered-envelope speech for listeners with normal and impaired hearing

Léger

Reed

et al. 2015

Consonant-identification ability was examined in normal-hearing (NH) and hearing-impaired (HI) listeners in the presence of steady-state and 10-Hz square-wave interrupted speech-shaped noise. The Hilbert transform was used to process speech stimuli (16 consonants in a-C-a syllables) to present envelope cues, temporal fine-structure (TFS) cues, or envelope cues recovered from TFS speech. The performance of the HI listeners was inferior to that of the NH listeners both in terms of lower levels of performance in the baseline condition and in the need for higher signal-to-noise ratio to yield a given level of performance. For NH listeners, scores were higher in interrupted noise than in steady-state noise for all speech types (indicating substantial masking release). For HI listeners, masking release was typically observed for TFS and recovered-envelope speech but not for unprocessed and envelope speech. For both groups of listeners, TFS and recovered-envelope speech yielded similar levels of performance and consonant confusion patterns. The masking release observed for TFS and recovered-envelope speech may be related to level effects associated with the manner in which the TFS processing interacts with the interrupted noise signal, rather than to the contributions of TFS cues per se.

“…Such amplification would be more detrimental to HI subjects than NH subjects because of their increased susceptibility to temporal and spectral masking. If the intelligibility of TFS speech is conveyed as RENVs, any disruptions introduced due to the TFS processing schemes will also have a comparable effect on the RENV signals (Apoux et al, 2013).…”

Section: Implications For Hearing Impairment and CI Signal Processingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Consonant identification using temporal fine structure and recovered envelope cues

Swaminathan

Reed

et al. 2014

The contribution of recovered envelopes (RENVs) to the utilization of temporal-fine structure (TFS) speech cues was examined in normal-hearing listeners. Consonant identification experiments used speech stimuli processed to present TFS or RENV cues. Experiment 1 examined the effects of exposure and presentation order using 16-band TFS speech and 40-band RENV speech recovered from 16-band TFS speech. Prior exposure to TFS speech aided in the reception of RENV speech. Performance on the two conditions was similar ($50%-correct) for experienced listeners as was the pattern of consonant confusions. Experiment 2 examined the effect of varying the number of RENV bands recovered from 16-band TFS speech. Mean identification scores decreased as the number of RENV bands decreased from 40 to 8 and were only slightly above chance levels for 16 and 8 bands. Experiment 3 examined the effect of varying the number of bands in the TFS speech from which 40-band RENV speech was constructed. Performance fell from 85%-to 31%-correct as the number of TFS bands increased from 1 to 32. Overall, these results suggest that the interpretation of previous studies that have used TFS speech may have been confounded with the presence of RENVs.