Effects of training on intelligbility and integration of sine-wave speech
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Date
2009-06
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The Ohio State University
Abstract
Although the auditory signal usually provides sufficient information for speech perception, visual cues become important when the auditory signal is compromised, as in the case of a hearing loss. However, research has shown that visual cues are used even when the auditory signal is completely intelligible (McGurk & MacDonald, 1976).
Subsequent studies have investigated the impact of reducing the quality of auditory information on the integration process. Grant and Seitz (1998) studied audiovisual integration by hearing-impaired subjects, and reported that even when the auditory input is poor, speech perception can improve with the aid of visual cues.
Integration for artificially reduced auditory inputs has also been investigated. One form of reduction was that used by Remez et al. (1981), who reduced speech signals to three time-varying sinusoids following the formants of the speech (“sine-wave speech”). Remez et al. showed that sine-wave speech can be highly intelligible in sentences, but in studies of audio-visual perception of individual syllables, sine-wave reductions have yielded poor performance (e.g., Anderson, 2007). It is possible that the relative unfamiliarity of this form of speech led to the poor results in integration studies.
This question was addressed by Exner (2008), who evaluated the effects of increased exposure to sine-wave syllables on auditory only and audio-visual perception. She found that even two hours of training produced significant improvement in performance. However, it was not clear in her study was whether performance had reached asymptotic levels.
The present study investigated the effects of longer training periods to determine if further improvements to sine-wave performance can be achieved. Five listeners received ten hours of auditory only training with eight syllables spoken by three talkers. Results showed significant improvement across training sessions, but the amount of audio-visual integration did not change. This supports the argument of Grant & Seitz (1998) that integration is a process independent of auditory or visual processing.
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Keywords
sine-wave speech, speech perception, integration