title: Effect of the division between early and late reflections on intelligibility of ideal binary-masked speech.
abstract: The ideal binary mask (IBM) that was originally defined in anechoic conditions has been found to yield substantial improvements in speech intelligibility in noise. The IBM has recently been extended to reverberant conditions where the direct sound and early reflections of target speech are regarded as the desired signal. It is of great interest to know how the division between early and late reflections impacts on the intelligibility of the IBM-processed noisy reverberant speech. In this present study, the division between early and late reflections in three rooms was first determined by four typical estimation approaches and then used to compute the IBMs in reverberant conditions. The IBMs were then applied to the noisy reverberant mixture signal for segregating the desired signal, and the segregated signal was further presented to normal-hearing listeners for word recognition. Results showed that the IBMs with different divisions between early and late reflections provided substantial improvements in speech intelligibility over the unprocessed mixture signals in all conditions tested, and there were small, but statistically significant, differences in speech intelligibility between the different IBMs in some conditions tested.
authors.affiliation: Institute of Acoustics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100190, China.
authors.forename: Junfeng
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Li
authors.affiliation: Institute of Acoustics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100190, China.
authors.forename: Risheng
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Xia
authors.affiliation: Institute of Linguistics, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing 100732, China.
authors.forename: Qiang
authors.initials: Q
authors.lastname: Fang
authors.affiliation: Institute of Linguistics, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing 100732, China.
authors.forename: Aijun
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Li
authors.affiliation: Institute of Acoustics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100190, China.
authors.forename: Jielin
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Pan
authors.affiliation: Institute of Acoustics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100190, China.
authors.forename: Yonghong
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Yan
mesh_terms: D000161:Acoustic Stimulation; D000162:Acoustics; D000328:Adult; D001302:Audiometry, Speech; 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; D014732:Vibration; D014833:Voice Quality; D055815:Young Adult