Vocoded speech provides less spectral information than natural, unprocessed speech, negatively affecting listener performance on speech intelligibility and talker gender classification tasks. In this study, young normal-hearing participants listened to noise-vocoded and tone-vocoded (i.e., sinewave-vocoded) sentences containing 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, or 32 channels, as well as non-vocoded sentences, and reported the words heard as well as the gender of the talker. Overall, performance was significantly better with tone-vocoded than noise-vocoded speech for both tasks. Within the talker gender classification task, biases in performance were observed for lower numbers of channels, especially when using the noise carrier.
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http://dx.doi.org/10.1121/10.0006285 | DOI Listing |
J Acoust Soc Am
January 2025
USC Viterbi School of Engineering, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California 90089-1455, USA.
Voice quality serves as a rich source of information about speakers, providing listeners with impressions of identity, emotional state, age, sex, reproductive fitness, and other biologically and socially salient characteristics. Understanding how this information is transmitted, accessed, and exploited requires knowledge of the psychoacoustic dimensions along which voices vary, an area that remains largely unexplored. Recent studies of English speakers have shown that two factors related to speaker size and arousal consistently emerge as the most important determinants of quality, regardless of who is speaking.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFHear Res
December 2024
Dept. of Otorhinolaryngology/Head and Neck Surgery, University Medical Center Groningen, University of Groningen, The Netherlands; Research School of Behavioral and Cognitive Neuroscience, Graduate School of Medical Sciences, University of Groningen, The Netherlands; W.J. Kolff Institute for Biomedical Engineering and Materials Science, Graduate School of Medical Sciences, University of Groningen, The Netherlands. Electronic address:
Voice cues, such as fundamental frequency (F0) and vocal tract length (VTL), help listeners identify the speaker's gender, perceive the linguistic and emotional prosody, and segregate competing talkers. Postlingually implanted adult cochlear implant (CI) users seem to have difficulty in perceiving and making use of voice cues, especially of VTL. Early implanted child CI users, in contrast, perceive and make use of both voice cues better than CI adults, and in patterns similar to their peers with normal hearing (NH).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Acoust Soc Am
November 2024
Department of Speech and Hearing Science, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Champaign, Illinois 61820, USA.
Gender and language effects on the long-term average speech spectrum (LTASS) have been reported, but typically using recordings that were bandlimited and/or failed to accurately capture extended high frequencies (EHFs). Accurate characterization of the full-band LTASS is warranted given recent data on the contribution of EHFs to speech perception. The present study characterized the LTASS for high-fidelity, anechoic recordings of males and females producing Bamford-Kowal-Bench sentences, digits, and unscripted narratives.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Public health measures implemented during the COVID-19 pandemic fundamentally altered the socioecological context in which children were developing.
Methods: Using Bronfenbrenner's socioecological theory, we investigate language acquisition among 2-year-old children (n = 4037) born during the pandemic. We focus on "late talkers", defined as children below the 10th percentile on the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories-III.
F1000Res
August 2024
2Department of Neuroscience, Imaging and Clinical Sciences, Gabriele d'Annunzio University of Chieti and Pescara, Chieti, Abruzzo, Italy.
Background: The consensus in scientific literature is that each child undergoes a unique linguistic development path, albeit with shared developmental stages. Some children excel or lag behind their peers in language skills. Consequently, a key challenge in language acquisition research is pinpointing factors influencing individual differences in language development.
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