The potential of onset enhancement for increased speech intelligibility in auditory prostheses

Koning, Raphael; Wouters, Jan

doi:10.1121/1.4748965

Cited by 36 publications

(27 citation statements)

References 58 publications

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“…Studies using paradigms similar to the one used here often predicted brain responses from only envelopes or only onsets [16,[21][22][23][24], but more recent studies show that both representations explain nonredundant portions of the responses [12,18]. Behaviorally, acoustic onsets are also specifically important for speech intelligibility [25,26]. Here we consider both envelope and onset features but focus on onset features in particular because of 21109, additional files specific to this paper are available at http://hdl.handle.net/1903/26370.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 85%

Neural speech restoration at the cocktail party: Auditory cortex recovers masked speech of both attended and ignored speakers

et al. 2020

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Humans are remarkably skilled at listening to one speaker out of an acoustic mixture of several speech sources. Two speakers are easily segregated, even without binaural cues, but the neural mechanisms underlying this ability are not well understood. One possibility is that early cortical processing performs a spectrotemporal decomposition of the acoustic mixture, allowing the attended speech to be reconstructed via optimally weighted recombinations that discount spectrotemporal regions where sources heavily overlap. Using human magnetoencephalography (MEG) responses to a 2-talker mixture, we show evidence for an alternative possibility, in which early, active segregation occurs even for strongly spectrotemporally overlapping regions. Early (approximately 70-millisecond) responses to nonoverlapping spectrotemporal features are seen for both talkers. When competing talkers’ spectrotemporal features mask each other, the individual representations persist, but they occur with an approximately 20-millisecond delay. This suggests that the auditory cortex recovers acoustic features that are masked in the mixture, even if they occurred in the ignored speech. The existence of such noise-robust cortical representations, of features present in attended as well as ignored speech, suggests an active cortical stream segregation process, which could explain a range of behavioral effects of ignored background speech.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 85%

Neural speech restoration at the cocktail party: Auditory cortex recovers masked speech of both attended and ignored speakers

et al. 2020

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“…It is possible that the algorithm would improve speech understanding in competing speech by assisting in spatial segregation. Koning and Wouters (2012) found that a monaural envelope enhancement strategy for CIs that operated by emphasizing the envelope onsets produced increasing speech understanding in noise under some circumstances. Since CI listeners may be relatively unaffected by distortions produced by filter interactions—interactions that can disturb NH participants—it is difficult to determine whether speech understanding in CI listening can be predicted from acoustic simulations.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 98%

A method to enhance the use of interaural time differences for cochlear implants in reverberant environments

Monaghan

Seeber

2016

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

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The ability of normal-hearing (NH) listeners to exploit interaural time difference (ITD) cues conveyed in the modulated envelopes of high-frequency sounds is poor compared to ITD cues transmitted in the temporal fine structure at low frequencies. Sensitivity to envelope ITDs is further degraded when envelopes become less steep, when modulation depth is reduced, and when envelopes become less similar between the ears, common factors when listening in reverberant environments. The vulnerability of envelope ITDs is particularly problematic for cochlear implant (CI) users, as they rely on information conveyed by slowly varying amplitude envelopes. Here, an approach to improve access to envelope ITDs for CIs is described in which, rather than attempting to reduce reverberation, the perceptual saliency of cues relating to the source is increased by selectively sharpening peaks in the amplitude envelope judged to contain reliable ITDs. Performance of the algorithm with room reverberation was assessed through simulating listening with bilateral CIs in headphone experiments with NH listeners. Relative to simulated standard CI processing, stimuli processed with the algorithm generated lower ITD discrimination thresholds and increased extents of laterality. Depending on parameterization, intelligibility was unchanged or somewhat reduced. The algorithm has the potential to improve spatial listening with CIs.

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“…Another stimulation strategy called the envelope enhancement (EE) strategy focuses on onset enhancement (Geurts & Wouters, 1999; Koning & Wouters, 2012, 2016). Similar to the TESM strategy that enhances rapid increases in a channel’s envelope, the EE strategy uses peak detection to enhance rapid increases in the envelopes.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Effect of Noise Reduction Gain Errors on Simulated Cochlear Implant Speech Intelligibility

2019

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It has been suggested that the most important factor for obtaining high speech intelligibility in noise with cochlear implant (CI) recipients is to preserve the low-frequency amplitude modulations of speech across time and frequency by, for example, minimizing the amount of noise in the gaps between speech segments. In contrast, it has also been argued that the transient parts of the speech signal, such as speech onsets, provide the most important information for speech intelligibility. The present study investigated the relative impact of these two factors on the potential benefit of noise reduction for CI recipients by systematically introducing noise estimation errors within speech segments, speech gaps, and the transitions between them. The introduction of these noise estimation errors directly induces errors in the noise reduction gains within each of these regions. Speech intelligibility in both stationary and modulated noise was then measured using a CI simulation tested on normal-hearing listeners. The results suggest that minimizing noise in the speech gaps can improve intelligibility, at least in modulated noise. However, significantly larger improvements were obtained when both the noise in the gaps was minimized and the speech transients were preserved. These results imply that the ability to identify the boundaries between speech segments and speech gaps may be one of the most important factors for a noise reduction algorithm because knowing the boundaries makes it possible to minimize the noise in the gaps as well as enhance the low-frequency amplitude modulations of the speech.

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The potential of onset enhancement for increased speech intelligibility in auditory prostheses

Cited by 36 publications

References 58 publications

Neural speech restoration at the cocktail party: Auditory cortex recovers masked speech of both attended and ignored speakers

Neural speech restoration at the cocktail party: Auditory cortex recovers masked speech of both attended and ignored speakers

A method to enhance the use of interaural time differences for cochlear implants in reverberant environments

Effect of Noise Reduction Gain Errors on Simulated Cochlear Implant Speech Intelligibility

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