ASA 129th Meeting - Washington, DC - 1995 May 30 .. Jun 06
4pSC5. Importance of tonal envelope cues in Chinese speech recognition.
Qian-Jie Fu
Dept. of Biomed. Eng., Univ. of Southern California and House Ear Inst.,
2100 West Third St., Los Angeles, CA 90057
Fan-Gang Zeng
Robert V. Shannon
Sigfrid D. Soli
House Ear Inst., Los Angeles, CA 90057
Temporal waveform envelope cues provide significant information for
English speech recognition, and, when combined with lip reading, could produce
near-perfect consonant identification performance [Van Tasell et al.,
1152--1161 (1987)]. Tonal patterns are important for Chinese speech recognition
and can be effectively conveyed by temporal envelope cues [D. H. Whalen and Y.
Xu, Phonetics 49, 25--47 (1992)]. This study investigates whether tones can
help Chinese-speaking listeners use envelope cues more effectively than English
listeners. The speech envelope was extracted from broad frequency bands and
used to modulate a noise of the same bandwidth. Mandarin vowels, consonants,
tones, and sentences were identified by ten native Chinese-speaking listeners
with 1, 2, 3, and 4 noise bands (or channels). The results showed that
recognition of vowels, consonants and sentences increases dramatically with the
number of channels, a pattern similar to that observed in English speech
recognition. However, tones were consistently recognized at about 80% correct
level independent of the number of channels. This high level of tone
recognition produced a significant difference in open-set sentence recognition
between Chinese (11%) and English (1%, p<0.01) for the one channel condition
where no spectral information is available.