Frequency compression is an effective alternative to conventional hearing aids amplification for patients with severe-to-profound middle- and high-frequency hearing loss and with some low-frequency residual hearing. In order to develop novel frequency compression strategy, it is important to first understand the mechanism for recognizing low-pass filtered speech, which simulates high-frequency hearing loss. The present work investigated three factors affecting the intelligibility of low-pass filtered speech, i.e., vowels, temporal fine-structure, and fundamental frequency (F0) contour. Mandarin sentences were processed to generate three types (i.e., vowel-only, fine-structure-only, and F0-contour-flattened) of low-pass filtered stimuli. Listening experiments with normal-hearing listeners showed that among the three factors assessed, the vowel-only low-pass filtered speech was the most intelligible, which was followed by the fine-structure-based low-pass filtered speech. Flattening F0-contour significantly deteriorated the intelligibility of low-pass filtered speech.
Cite as: Wang, L., Chen, F. (2017) Factors Affecting the Intelligibility of Low-Pass Filtered Speech. Proc. Interspeech 2017, 563-566, doi: 10.21437/Interspeech.2017-2
@inproceedings{wang17c_interspeech,
author={Lei Wang and Fei Chen},
title={{Factors Affecting the Intelligibility of Low-Pass Filtered Speech}},
year=2017,
booktitle={Proc. Interspeech 2017},
pages={563--566},
doi={10.21437/Interspeech.2017-2}
}