title: Relationship between speech recognition in noise and sparseness.
abstract: OBJECTIVE
  Established methods for predicting speech recognition in noise require knowledge of clean speech signals, placing limitations on their application. The study evaluates an alternative approach based on characteristics of noisy speech, specifically its sparseness as represented by the statistic kurtosis.
  
  
  METHODS
  Experiments 1 and 2 involved acoustic analysis of vowel-consonant-vowel (VCV) syllables in babble noise, comparing kurtosis, glimpsing areas, and extended speech intelligibility index (ESII) of noisy speech signals with one another and with pre-existing speech recognition scores. Experiment 3 manipulated kurtosis of VCV syllables and investigated effects on speech recognition scores in normal-hearing listeners.
  
  
  METHODS
  Pre-existing speech recognition data for Experiments 1 and 2; seven normal-hearing participants for Experiment 3.
  
  
  RESULTS
  Experiments 1 and 2 demonstrated that kurtosis calculated in the time-domain from noisy speech is highly correlated (r > 0.98) with established prediction models: glimpsing and ESII. All three measures predicted speech recognition scores well. The final experiment showed a clear monotonic relationship between speech recognition scores and kurtosis.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  Speech recognition performance in noise is closely related to the sparseness (kurtosis) of the noisy speech signal, at least for the types of speech and noise used here and for listeners with normal hearing.
authors: Institute of Sound and Vibration Research, University of Southampton, Southampton, UK.
authors: Guoping
authors: G
authors: Li
authors: Mark E
authors: ME
authors: Lutman
authors: Shouyan
authors: S
authors: Wang
authors: Stefan
authors: S
authors: Bleeck
mesh_terms: D000161:Acoustic Stimulation; D000328:Adult; D001301:Audiometry, Pure-Tone; D001302:Audiometry, Speech; D001309:Auditory Threshold; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D015233:Models, Statistical; D009622:Noise / Q000009:adverse effects*; D010470:Perceptual Masking; D021641:Recognition, Psychology; D013018:Sound Spectrography; D013061:Speech Acoustics; D013065:Speech Intelligibility; D013067:Speech Perception; D013997:Time Factors