INTERSPEECH 2004 - ICSLP 8th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing Jeju Island, Korea October 4-8, 2004

Intelligibility of Degraded speech from Smeared STRAIGHT Spectrum

Hideki Kawahara, Hideki Banno, Toshio Irino, Jiang Jin

Wakayama University, Japan

Intelligibility of degraded speech sounds has been investigated based on a new signal processing technique using a high-quality vocoder, STRAIGHT. This enables us to manipulate essential speech parameters for vocal tract filtering and glottal excitation. We report that the effect of spectral smearing on the intelligibility of Japanese four- mora words as an initial study. Results reveal that the intelligibility decreases as the degree of smearing increases. We also investigated the relationship between the phonetic and word intelligibilities and found that the word identification score was predicted as the power function of the phonetic score when the power value was about 5. This implies that the mora structure and prosodic information such as F0, timing, and duration also play an important role in speech perception.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Kawahara, Hideki / Banno, Hideki / Irino, Toshio / Jin, Jiang (2004): "Intelligibility of degraded speech from smeared STRAIGHT spectrum", In INTERSPEECH-2004, 473-476.