Abstract
Speech perception is key to verbal communication. For people with hearing loss, the capability to recognize speech is restricted, particularly in a noisy environment or the situations without visual cues, such as lip-reading unavailable via phone call. This study aimed to understand the improvement of vocoded speech intelligibility in cochlear implant (CI) simulation through two potential methods: Speech Enhancement (SE) and Audiovisual Integration. A fully convolutional neural network (FCN) using an intelligibility-oriented objective function was recently proposed and proven to effectively facilitate the speech intelligibility as an advanced denoising SE approach. Furthermore, audiovisual integration is reported to supply better speech comprehension compared to audio-only information. An experiment was designed to test speech intelligibility using tone-vocoded speech in CI simulation with a group of normal-hearing listeners. Experimental results confirmed the effectiveness of the FCN-based denoising SE and audiovisual integration on vocoded speech. Also, it positively recommended that these two methods could become a blended feature in a CI processor to improve the speech intelligibility for CI users under noisy conditions.
Highlights
C OMMUNICATION is an essential tool that people employ to achieve particular goals, from primary needs to higher-level satisfactions [1]
The normalized covariance measure (NCM) measure in this study showed consistently higher scores under fully convolutional neural network (FCN) conditions, especially when targeting a non-stationary noise type (Figure 4b) as shorttime objective intelligibility (STOI) did
The p-value of 0.0126 for Video versus Conditions showed the statistically significant effect on visual facilitation. This confirmed that visual cues were having effect on conditions, but specific aids for each condition were in need of looking into the difference
Summary
C OMMUNICATION is an essential tool that people employ to achieve particular goals, from primary needs to higher-level satisfactions [1]. Verbal communication is among the most efficient means to deliver messages people would like to share. The nature of language acquisition in humans remains fuzzy, but theories from Skinner [2] and Chomsky [3] to relatively modern studies [4], [5], [6] have touched base to depict the speech production in humankind. It is easier for people to understand as well as predict others’ actions. Becomes a crucial process for people to gain social reward in their everyday life [7]. Valid verbal communication makes people feel not alone
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