Cochlea-scaled entropy, not consonants, vowels, or time, best predicts speech intelligibility.

ABSTRACT: Speech sounds are traditionally divided into consonants and vowels. When only vowels or only consonants are replaced by noise, listeners are more accurate understanding sentences in which consonants are replaced but vowels remain. From such data, vowels have been suggested to be more important for understanding sentences; however, such conclusions are mitigated by the fact that replaced consonant segments were roughly one-third shorter than vowels. We report two experiments that demonstrate listener performance to be better predicted by simple psychoacoustic measures of cochlea-scaled spectral change across time. First, listeners identified sentences in which portions of consonants (C), vowels (V), CV transitions, or VC transitions were replaced by noise. Relative intelligibility was not w

SUBMITTER: Stilp CE 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC2901476 | biostudies-literature | 2010 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature