Effects of filtering preceding noise on the intelligibility of voiced plosives
William A. Ainsworth, Teresa Cervera · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2000
The intelligibility of voiced plosives in continuous noise is greater than in noise which is coincident with the speech [W. A. Ainsworth and G. Meyer, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 96, 687–694 (1994)]. It is suggested that this could be due to some adaptation process. In order to test this hypothesis, experiments have been performed to measure the intelligibility of voiced plosives in isolated syllables with different durations of preceding noise. The effects of the spectral shape of the noise have also been examined. It was found that, on average, 800 ms of band-stop filtered noise preceding the syllable increased the recognition rate of the plosives by 14%, band-pass filtered noise by 12%, low-pass filtered noise by 7%, but high-pass filtered noise by only 3% compared with co-gated noise. The time constant of the adaptation process was estimated to be 165 ms. [Work supported in part by EU TMR Network SPHEAR.]