The effect of situation-specific non-speech acoustic cues on the intelligibility of speech in noise

Ward, L; Shirley, BG; Tang, Y; Davies, WJ

Abstract

In everyday life, speech is often accompanied by a situationspecific acoustic cue; a hungry bark as you ask ‘Has anyone
fed the dog?’. This paper investigates the effect such cues have
on speech intelligibility in noise and evaluates their interaction
with the established effect of situation-specific semantic cues.
This work is motivated by the introduction of new object-based
broadcast formats, which have the potential to optimise intelligibility by controlling the level of individual broadcast audio
elements, at point of service. Results of this study show that
situation-specific acoustic cues alone can improve word recognition in multi-talker babble by 69.5%, a similar amount to semantic cues. The combination of both semantic and acoustic
cues provide further improvement of 106.0% compared with
no cues, and 18.7% compared with semantic cues only. Interestingly, whilst increasing subjective intelligibility of the target word, the presence of acoustic cues degraded the objective intelligibility of the speech-based semantic cues by 47.0%
(equivalent to reducing the speech level by 4.5 dB). This paper
discusses the interactions between the two types of cues and the
implications that these results have for assessing and improving
the intelligibility of broadcast speech.

• Presentation Conference Type: Conference Paper (published)
• Conference Name: INTERSPEECH 2017, 18th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association
• Start Date: Aug 20, 2017
• End Date: Aug 24, 2017
• Publication Date: Aug 24, 2017
• Deposit Date: Jan 11, 2022
• Journal: INTERSPEECH 2017, 18th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association
• Print ISSN: 1990-9772
• Pages: 2958-2962
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.21437/Interspeech.2017-500
• Publisher URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.21437/Interspeech.2017-500
• Related Public URLs: https://doi.org/10.21437/Interspeech.2017
• Additional Information: Access Information : This conference paper can be freely accessed using the link above.; Event Type : Conference