Background/Objectives: Speech perception typically takes place against a background of other speech or noise. The present study investigates the effectiveness of segregating speech streams within a competing speech signal, examining whether cues such...
Pathological speech such as Oesophageal Speech (OS) is difficult to understand due to the presence of undesired artefacts and lack of normal healthy speech characteristics. Modern speech technologies and machine learning enable us to transform pathol...
The Demucs-Denoiser model has been recently shown to achieve a high level of performance for online speech enhancement, but assumes that only one speech source is present in the fed mixture. In real-life multiple-speech-source scenarios, it is not ce...
The “cocktail party” problem—how a listener perceives speech in noisy environments—is typically studied using speech (multi-talker babble) or noise maskers. However, realistic cocktail party scenarios often include background...
Enhancing speech captured by distant microphones is a challenging task. In this study, we investigate the multichannel signal properties of the single acoustic vector sensor (AVS) to obtain the inter-sensor data ratio (ISDR) model in the time-frequen...
The selection of a target when training deep neural networks for speech enhancement is an important consideration. Different masks have been shown to exhibit different performance characteristics depending on the application and the conditions. This...
It is a critical problem to accurately separate clean speech in the multispeaker scenario for different speakers. However, in most cases, smart devices such as smart phones interact with only one specific user. As a consequence, the speech separation...
When recording conversations, there may be multiple people talking at once. While our human ears can filter out unwanted sounds, this can be challenging for automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems, leading to reduced accuracy. To address this issu...
Speech is a highly skilled motor activity that shares a core problem with other motor skills: how to reduce the massive degrees of freedom (DOF) to the extent that the central nervous control and learning of complex motor movements become possible. I...
Cochlear implants (CIs) require efficient speech processing to maximize information transmission to the brain, especially in noise. A novel CI processing strategy was proposed in our previous studies, in which sparsity-constrained non-negative matrix...
Recently, supervised learning methods have shown promising performance, especially deep neural network-based (DNN) methods, in the application of single-channel speech enhancement. Generally, those approaches extract the acoustic features directly fr...
Background/objectives: Speech sound disorder (SSD) and developmental language disorder (DLD) are common childhood disorders of communication that can also co-occur. This study investigated the reported content, format and delivery of UK speech and la...
As the world’s population is aging and there is a shortage of sufficient caring manpower, the development of intelligent care robots is a feasible solution. At present, plenty of care robots have been developed, but humanized care robots that c...
Current target-speaker extraction (TSE) models have achieved good performance in separating target speech from highly overlapped multi-talker speech. However, in real-world applications, multi-talker speech is often sparsely overlapped, and the targe...
27 November 2024
Background: Spatial release from masking (SRM) is the improvement in speech intelligibility when the masking signals are spatially separated from the target signal. Young, normal- hearing listeners have a robust auditory sys-tem that is capable of us...
The extraction of a target speaker from mixtures of different speakers has attracted extensive amounts of attention and research. Previous studies have proposed several methods, such as SpeakerBeam, to tackle this speech extraction problem using clea...
How speech prosody is processed in the brain during language production remains an unsolved issue. The present work used the phrase-recall paradigm to analyze brain oscillation underpinning rhythmic processing in speech production. Participants were...
In the context of assisted human, identifying and enhancing non-stationary speech targets speech in various noise environments, such as a cocktail party, is an important issue for real-time speech separation. Previous studies mostly used microphone s...
The quality of air traffic control speech is crucial. However, internal and external noise can impact air traffic control speech quality. Clear speech instructions and feedback help optimize flight processes and responses to emergencies. The traditio...
In this paper, we propose a preprocessing strategy for denoising of speech data based on speech segment detection. A design of computationally efficient speech denoising is necessary to develop a scalable method for large-scale data sets. Furthermore...
In order to develop computer tools for speech therapy that reliably classify speech productions, there is a need for speech production corpora that characterize the target population in terms of age, gender, and native language. Apart from including...
Tonal languages make use of pitch variation for distinguishing lexical semantics, and their melodic richness seems comparable to that of music. The present study investigated a novel priming effect of melody on the pitch processing of Mandarin speech...
In the present study, we investigated if individuals with neurogenic speech sound impairments of three types, Parkinson’s dysarthria, apraxia of speech, and aphasic phonological impairment, accommodate their speech to the natural speech rhythm of an...
In this paper, we focus on a challenging, but interesting, task in speech emotion recognition (SER), i.e., cross-corpus SER. Unlike conventional SER, a feature distribution mismatch may exist between the labeled source (training) and target (testing)...
There is a large interest in the annotation of speech addressed to infants. Infant-directed speech (IDS) has acoustic properties that might pose a challenge to automatic speech recognition (ASR) tools developed for adult-directed speech (ADS). While...
Studies so far have analyzed the effect of distractor stimuli in different types of brain–computer interface (BCI). However, the effect of a background speech has not been studied using an auditory event-related potential (ERP-BCI), a convenient opti...
1 November 2003
This study examined the effects of orofacial myofunctional therapy (OMT) on speech intelligibility in adults with persistent articulation impairments. Six adults in the age range of 18–23 years were selected to receive orofacial myofunctional therapy...
In this research, a multi-channel target speech enhancement scheme is proposed that is based on deep learning (DL) architecture and assisted by multi-source tracking using a labeled random finite set (RFS) framework. A neural network based on minimum...
In this paper, we investigate the problem of cross-corpus speech emotion recognition (SER), in which the training (source) and testing (target) speech samples belong to different corpora. This case thus leads to a feature distribution mismatch betwee...
Electro-laryngeal (EL) speech has poor intelligibility and naturalness, which hampers the popular use of the electro-larynx. Voice conversion (VC) can enhance EL speech. However, if the EL speech to be enhanced is with complicated tone variation rule...
Personalized emotion recognition provides an individual training model for each target user in order to mitigate the accuracy problem when using general training models collected from multiple users. Existing personalized speech emotion recognition r...
We propose two approaches to handle speech recognition for task domains with sparse matched training data. One is an active learning method that selects training data for the target domain from another general domain that already has a significant am...
Background: The outcome of cochlear implantation has improved over the last decades, but there are still patients with less benefit. Despite numerous studies examining the cochlear implant (CI) outcome, variations in speech comprehension with CI rema...
For reliable speech recognition, it is necessary to handle the usage environments. In this study, we target voice-driven multi-unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) control. Although many studies have introduced several systems for voice-driven UAV control...
Laser monitoring has received more and more attention in many application fields thanks to its essential advantages. The analysis shows that the target speech in the laser monitoring signals is often interfered by the echoes, resulting in a decline i...
In voice conversion (VC), it is highly desirable to obtain transformed speech signals that are perceptually close to a target speaker’s voice. To this end, a perceptually meaningful criterion where the human auditory system was taken into consi...
Urban environments are characterised by the presence of copious and unstructured noise. This noise continuously challenges speech intelligibility both in normal-hearing and hearing-impaired individuals. In this paper, we investigate the impact of urb...
Parkinson’s disease is a progressive neurodegenerative disorder caused by dopaminergic neuron degeneration. Parkinsonian speech impairment is one of the earliest presentations of the disease and, along with tremor, is suitable for pre-diagnosis...
Online multi-microphone speech enhancement aims to extract target speech from multiple noisy inputs by exploiting the spatial information as well as the spectro-temporal characteristics with low latency. Acoustic parameters such as the acoustic trans...
Cross-corpus speech emotion recognition (SER) is a challenging task, and its difficulty lies in the mismatch between the feature distributions of the training (source domain) and testing (target domain) data, leading to the performance degradation wh...
Children’s songs are omnipresent and highly attractive stimuli in infants’ input. Previous work suggests that infants process linguistic–phonetic information from simplified sung melodies. The present study investigated whether infa...
Prepulse inhibition (PPI) is the reduction in the acoustic startle reflex (ASR) when the startling stimulus (pulse) is preceded by a weaker, non-starting stimulus. This can be enhanced by facilitating selective attention to the prepulse against a noi...
The speech we hear every day is typically “degraded” by competing sounds and the idiosyncratic vocal characteristics of individual speakers. While the comprehension of “degraded” speech is normally automatic, it depends on dynamic and adaptive proces...
18 April 2024
Speech intelligibility is a concern for public health, especially in non-ideal listening conditions where listeners often listen to the target speech in the presence of background noise. With advances in technology, synthetic speech has been increasi...
Automatic Speaker Verification (ASV) systems are increasingly employed to secure access to services and facilities. However, recent advances in speech deepfake generation pose serious threats to their reliability. Modern speech synthesis models can c...
Online toxic discourses could result in conflicts between groups or harm to online communities. Hate speech is complex and multifaceted harmful or offensive content targeting individuals or groups. Existing literature reviews have generally focused o...
The implementation of an intervention protocol aimed at increasing vocal complexity in three pre-linguistic children with cerebral palsy (two males, starting age 15 months, and one female, starting age 16 months) was evaluated utilising a repeated AB...
In multi-lingual, multi-speaker environments (e.g., international conference scenarios), speech, language, and background sounds can overlap. In real-world scenarios, source separation techniques are needed to separate target sounds. Downstream tasks...
This longitudinal study examines the acquisition of target-like patterns of phonological variation by 17 second language (L2) French learners during a semester or year of study abroad (SA) in France. In this study, speech data from sociolinguistic in...
It has been demonstrated that interactive speech and noise modeling outperforms traditional speech modeling-only methods for speech enhancement (SE). With a dual-branch topology that simultaneously predicts target speech and noise signals and employs...
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