The effect of speech material on the band importance function for Mandarin Chinese

• Main Authors: Chen, J. (Author), Du, Y. (Author), Shen, Y. (Author), Wu, X. (Author)
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Acoustical Society of America 2019
• Subjects: Across frequency regions; Adaptive procedure; adult; Adult; article; Auditory Perception; Bayes theorem; Bayes Theorem; clinical article; Contextual information; Different frequency; female; Female; hearing; human; human experiment; Humans; Importance functions; language; Language; male; Male; mandarin; Mandarin speech recognition; noise; Noise; nonhuman; physiology; prediction; Relative contribution; speech discrimination; speech intelligibility; Speech intelligibility; Speech Intelligibility; Speech intelligibility index; speech perception; Speech Perception; Speech recognition
• Online Access: View Fulltext in Publisher

 Speech material influences the relative contributions of different frequency regions to intelligibility for English. In the current study, whether a similar effect of speech material is present for Mandarin Chinese was investigated. Speech recognition was measured using three speech materials in Mandarin, including disyllabic words, nonsense sentences, and meaningful sentences. These materials differed from one another in terms of the amount of contextual information and word frequency. The band importance function (BIF), as defined under the Speech Intelligibility Index (SII) framework, was used to quantify the contributions across frequency regions. The BIFs for the three speech materials were estimated from 16 adults who were native speakers of Mandarin. A Bayesian adaptive procedure was used to efficiently estimate the octave-frequency BIFs for the three materials for each listener. As the amount of contextual information increased, low-frequency bands (e.g., 250 and 500 Hz) became more important for speech recognition, consistent with English. The BIF was flatter for Mandarin than for comparable English speech materials. Introducing the language-and material-specific BIFs to the SII model led to improved predictions of Mandarin speech-recognition performance. Results suggested the necessity of developing material-specific BIFs for Mandarin. © 2019 Acoustical Society of America.