The effect of F0 contours on the intelligibility of speech against interfering sounds for Mandarin Chinese

Abstract

To study the role of F0 contour on speech intelligibility for Mandarin Chinese, speech reception thresholds (SRTs) of mono-tone speech and multi-tone speech were measured both in steady speech-spectrum noise (SSN) and in two-talkers’ speech (TTS). The effect of informational masking (IM) in TTS masking was also examined. The mono-tone speech was produced by mono-tone sentences, which only consisted of syllables with tone 1 or tone 0. All sentences used in this study were grammatically correct but semantically anomalous to avoid the effect of sentence context. The type of TTS maskers was also manipulated as mono-tone or multi-tone. The results revealed: 1) For SSN masking, there was no significant difference between the mono-tone speech and the multi-tone speech (-7.8 dB vs. -7.3 dB on SRTs), indicating a weak effect of altering F0 contour at the sentence level. 2) However, for TTS masking, the intelligibility of multi-tone speech in multi-tone masking was significantly difficult (2 dB increase for SRT) than other conditions, indicating an important role of F0 contour in IM. These results were different from the corresponding reports for English speech, and the characteristics of F0 contour and language were analyzed and discussed. [supported by a NSFC grant 61473008.]