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The Display of Visual, Auditory, and Tactual Information
Published in Robert W. Proctor, Van Zandt Trisha, Human Factors in Simple and Complex Systems, 2018
Robert W. Proctor, Van Zandt Trisha
Speech messages are common for the transmission of auditory information. When designing a speech display, the designer has a choice between natural and artificially generated speech (Stanton, 2006c). Digitized natural speech is easier to comprehend than synthesized speech, but it requires more data storage and cannot be generated as needed (Baldwin, 2012). Regardless of the kind of display the designer chooses, the voice must be intelligible. For natural speech, intelligibility depends primarily on the frequencies between about 750 and 3000 Hz. Intelligibility is affected by several other factors (Boff & Lincoln, 1988): the type of material being spoken, speech filtering, the presence of visual cues, and the presence of noise. Speech intelligibility is better for structured material, such as sentences, than for unstructured material, primarily because of the redundancy provided by the structure. We presented evidence in Chapter 7 that grammatically and semantically correct sentences are perceived more accurately than strings of unrelated words. Similarly, identification thresholds for single words vary as a function of the number of syllables, the phonetic content, and the stress pattern.
How we hear
Published in Karl H.E. Kroemer, Fitting the Human, 2017
Understanding verbal communications is a psychological process that requires suitable acoustical conditions. A sufficient portion of the voice message must penetrate the noise to achieve understanding. Face-to-face communication provides visual cues that enhance the intelligibility of speech, even in the presence of background noise. Indirect voice communications lack the visual cues. The distance from the speaker to the listener, the background noise level, and the voice level are important considerations. The ambient air pressure and the gaseous composition of the air affect the efficiency and the frequency of the human voice and, consequently, of speech communication. Intelligibility
Evaluating Performance of Speech Enhancement Algorithms
Published in Philipos C. Loizou, Speech Enhancement, 2013
Quality is only one of the many attributes of the speech signal. Intelligibility is a different attribute and the two are not equivalent. Hence, different assessment methods are used to evaluate the quality and intelligibility of processed speech. Quality is highly subjective in nature and it is difficult to evaluate reliably. This is partly because individual listeners have different internal standards of what constitutes “good” or “poor” quality, resulting in large variability in rating scores among listeners. Quality measures assess “how” a speaker produces an utterance, and includes attributes such as “natural,” “raspy,” “hoarse,” “scratchy,” and so on. Quality possesses many dimensions, too many to enumerate. For practical purposes, we typically restrict ourselves to only a few dimensions of speech quality depending on the application. Intelligibility measures assess “what” the speaker said, that is, the meaning or the content of the spoken words. Unlike quality, intelligibility is not subjective and can be easily measured by presenting speech material (sentences, words, etc.) to a group of listeners and asking them to identify the words spoken. Intelligibility is quantified by counting the number of words or phonemes identified correctly.
Speech intelligibility test methodology applied to powered air-purifying respirators used in healthcare
Published in Journal of Occupational and Environmental Hygiene, 2020
Susan Xu, Jeremy Simons, Patrick Yorio, Dana Rottach, Ziqing Zhuang, Lewis Radonovich
Speech intelligibility (SI) is a measure of effective communication and a specific level of hearing effectiveness, i.e., correctly gathering, processing, and interpreting spoken words. Coates et al. (2000) and Radonovich et al. (2010) offer valuable insights into a concern among healthcare workers that loose-fitting PAPRs decrease SI in a multisensory and busy healthcare delivery environment, something that is perhaps most evident in intensive, urgent, or emergency care settings.
Implementation and evaluation of ASHRAE’s acoustic Performance Measurement Protocols
Published in Science and Technology for the Built Environment, 2019
Gabrielle McMorrow, Liping Wang
A speech intelligibility score (derived from SII) is highly dependent on a number of variables, including the “nature of the message being transmitted (e.g., its syntactic, semantic, linguistic, and contextual constraints),” and the “proficiency of the talkers and listeners” (ANSI 1997). For this calculation, the ⅓-octave SII calculation procedure was used. An assumed talker level of “normal” was used in calculations, as listed in Table 3 of ANSI S3.5 (ANSI 1997).