The role of fundamental frequency contours in the perception of speech against interfering speech

Binns, Christine and Culling, John Francis ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1107-9802 2007. The role of fundamental frequency contours in the perception of speech against interfering speech. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 122 (3) , pp. 1765-1776. 10.1121/1.2751394

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Abstract

Four experiments investigated the effect of the fundamental frequency (F0) contour on speech intelligibility against interfering sounds. Speech reception thresholds (SRTs) were measured for sentences with different manipulations of their F0 contours. These manipulations involved either reductions in F0 variation, or complete inversion of the F0 contour. Against speech-shaped noise, a flattened F0 contour had no significant impact on SRTs compared to a normal F0 contour; the mean SRT for the flattened contour was only 0.4 dB higher. The mean SRT for the inverted contour, however, was 1.3 dB higher than for the normal F0 contour. When the sentences were played against a single-talker interferer, the overall effect was greater, with a 2.0 dB difference between normal and flattened conditions, and 3.8 dB between normal and inverted. There was no effect of altering the F0 contour of the interferer, indicating that any abnormality of the F0 contour serves to reduce intelligibility of the target speech, but does not alter the masking produced by interfering speech. Low-pass filtering the F0 contour increased SRTs; elimination of frequencies between 2 and 4 Hz had the greatest effect. Filtering sentences with inverted contours did not have a significant effect on SRTs.

Item Type:	Article
Status:	Published
Schools:	Psychology
Uncontrolled Keywords:	speech recognition; speech intelligibility; acoustic noise; acoustic filters
Publisher:	Acoustical Society of America
ISSN:	0001-4966
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	30 March 2016
Last Modified:	04 May 2023 02:17
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/13738

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