A computational model for assessment of speech intelligibility in informational masking

作     者：Xihong WU Jing CHEN 

作者机构：Speech and Hearing Research CenterKey Laboratory of Machine Perception(Ministry of Education)Peking UniversityBeijing 100871China 

出 版 物：《Frontiers of Electrical and Electronic Engineering in China》 (中国电气与电子工程前沿（英文版）)

年 卷 期：2012年第7卷第1期

页      面：107-115页

学科分类：0711[理学-系统科学] 07[理学] 

基　　金：国家自然科学基金 核高基国家重大科技专项 The project from the Ministry of Science and Technology of China A Newton International Fellowship Alumni Follow-on Funding from the Royal Society, UK 

主　　题：auditory computational model speech intelligibility informational masking F0 contour harmonic extraction 

摘      要：The existing auditory computational mod- els for evaluating speech intelligibility can only account for energetic masking, and the effect of informational masking is rarely described in these models. This study was aimed to make a computational model considering the mechanism of informational masking. Several psy- choacoustic experiments were conducted to test the ef- fect of informational masking on speech intelligibility by manipulating the number of masking talker, speech rate, and the similarity of F0 contour between target and masker. The results showed that the speech recep- tion threshold for the target increased as the F0 contours of the masker became more similar to that of the tar- get, suggesting that the difficulty in segregating the tar- get harmonics from the masker harmonics may underlie the informational masking effect. Based on these stud- ies, a new auditory computational model was made by inducing the auditory function of harmonic extraction to the traditional model of speech intelligibility index （SII）, named as harmonic extraction （HF） model. The predictions of the HF model are highly consistent with the experimental results.