Perceptual Contributions of Vowels and Consonant-vowel Transitions in Understanding Time-compressed Mandarin Sentences
(3 minutes introduction)
| Changjie Pan (SUSTech, China), Feng Yang (Shenzhen Second People’s Hospital, China), Fei Chen (SUSTech, China) |
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Many early studies reported the importance of vowels and vowel-consonant transitions to speech intelligibility. The present work assessed their perceptual impacts to the understanding of time-compressed sentences, which could be used to measure the temporal acuity during speech understanding. Mandarin sentences were edited to selectively preserve vowel centers or vowel-consonant transitional segments, and compress the rest regions with equipment time compression rates (TCRs) up to 3, including conditions only preserving vowel centers or vowel-consonant transitions. The processed stimuli were presented to normal-hearing listeners to recognize. Results showed that, consistent with the segmental contributions in understanding uncompressed speech, the vowel-only time-compressed stimuli were highly intelligible (i.e., intelligibility score >85%) at a TCR around 3, and vowel-consonant transitions carried important intelligibility information in understanding time-compressed sentences. The time-compression conditions in the present work provided higher intelligibility scores than their counterparties in understanding the PSOLA-processed time-compressed sentences with TCRs around 3. The findings in this work suggested that the design of time compression processing could be guided towards selectively preserving perceptually important speech segments (e.g., vowels) in the future.
