Role of Clear Speech Attribute on Fricatives Perception for the Hard of Hearing

Abstract

In difficult listening environments or when a listener's dynamic range is severely reduced, speech recognition becomes a challenging task. One way to alleviate this difficulty is to speak 'clearly' as opposed to 'conversationally' to these individuals [5,6]. Clear speech has an intelligibility advantage over typical slow speech on account of some special attributes. The present study was specifically concerned with the effect of one such acoustic attribute of clear speech -'Consonant-Vowel intensity ratio', on speech perception. A case for synthetic clear speech in the context of hearing impairment was constituted. Fricatives of English language with cardinal vowels-/a i u/, were additively mixed with comb-filtered white noise at three SNRs. Computerized test administration system was developed to study the responses of five listeners. The perceptual analysis was accomplished in terms of information transmission analysis measures. The overall information transmission and transmission of consonant features have reported appreciable improvement. Under adverse noise masking condition (SNR=6 dB), the maximum intelligibility benefit of 24% points and 38% points were reported with two testing procedures.