Towards a Danish speech material for speech-on-speech masking investigations
Jens Bo Nielsen, Tobias Neher, Torsten Dau · Proceedings of the International Symposium on Auditory and Audiological Research · 2011
The objective of the present project is to create a Danish speech material designed specifically for investigations of speech-on-speech masking. Speech-on-speech masking is characterized by “informational” masking effects, often defined as the masking that speech creates in addition to the energetic masking by pure noise. In the present project, 804 unique sentences have been created, divided into three subsets, and uttered by three professional female talkers. Listening tests are in progress in order to compile test lists, each consisting of 20 sentences of approximately equal intelligibility. The final corpus is expected to consist of three sets of 10 test lists that are equally usable as target or masker signals. A pilot validation of the corpus has shown a high average speech recognition threshold (SRT) and a relatively small test-retest standard deviation compared to other materials.