This paper describes a number of listening experiments to investigate the relative contribution of temporal envelope modulations and fine structure to speech intelligibility. The amplitude envelopes of 24 1/4‐oct bands (covering 100–6400 Hz) were processed in several ways (e.g., fast compression) in order to assess the importance of the modulation peaks and troughs. Results for 60 normal‐hearing subjects show that reduction of modulations by the addition of noise is more detrimental to sentence intelligibility than the same degree of reduction achieved by direct manipulation of the envelope; in some cases the benefit in speech‐reception threshold (SRT) is almost 7 dB. Two crossover levels can be defined in dividing the temporal envelope into two equally important parts. The first crossover level divides the envelope into two perceptually equal parts: Removing modulations either x dB below or above that level yields the same intelligibility score. The second crossover level divides the envelope into two acoustically equal peak and trough parts. The perceptual level is 9–12 dB higher than the acoustic level, indicating that envelope peaks are perceptually more important than troughs. Further results showed that 24 intact temporal speech envelopes with noise fine structure retain perfect intelligibility. In general, for the present type of signal manipulations, no one‐to‐one relation between the modulation‐transfer function and the intelligibility scores could be established.
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January 1995
January 01 1995
Temporal envelope and fine structure cues for speech intelligibility
Rob Drullman
Rob Drullman
Department of Oto‐rhino‐laryngology, Free University Hospital, P. O. Box 7057, 1007 MB Amsterdam, The Netherlands
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J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 97, 585–592 (1995)
Article history
Received:
March 08 1994
Accepted:
July 27 1994
Citation
Rob Drullman; Temporal envelope and fine structure cues for speech intelligibility. J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 1 January 1995; 97 (1): 585–592. https://doi.org/10.1121/1.413112
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