Zaar Johannes, Dau Torsten
Hearing Systems Group, Department of Electrical Engineering, Technical University of Denmark, DK-2800 Kgs. Lyngby, Denmark.
J Acoust Soc Am. 2015 Sep;138(3):1253-67. doi: 10.1121/1.4928142.
Responses obtained in consonant perception experiments typically show a large variability across stimuli of the same phonetic identity. The present study investigated the influence of different potential sources of this response variability. It was distinguished between source-induced variability, referring to perceptual differences caused by acoustical differences in the speech tokens and/or the masking noise tokens, and receiver-related variability, referring to perceptual differences caused by within- and across-listener uncertainty. Consonant-vowel combinations consisting of 15 consonants followed by the vowel /i/ were spoken by two talkers and presented to eight normal-hearing listeners both in quiet and in white noise at six different signal-to-noise ratios. The obtained responses were analyzed with respect to the different sources of variability using a measure of the perceptual distance between responses. The speech-induced variability across and within talkers and the across-listener variability were substantial and of similar magnitude. The noise-induced variability, obtained with time-shifted realizations of the same random process, was smaller but significantly larger than the amount of within-listener variability, which represented the smallest effect. The results have implications for the design of consonant perception experiments and provide constraints for future models of consonant perception.
在辅音感知实验中获得的反应通常在相同语音身份的刺激之间表现出很大的变异性。本研究调查了这种反应变异性的不同潜在来源的影响。区分了源诱导变异性，指由语音样本和/或掩蔽噪声样本中的声学差异引起的感知差异，以及与接收者相关的变异性，指由听者内部和听者之间的不确定性引起的感知差异。由两个说话者说出由15个辅音后跟元音/i/组成的辅音-元音组合，并以六种不同的信噪比在安静环境和白噪声环境中呈现给八名听力正常的听者。使用反应之间感知距离的度量，针对不同的变异性来源对获得的反应进行分析。说话者之间和说话者内部的语音诱导变异性以及听者之间的变异性都很大且幅度相似。通过对相同随机过程的时移实现获得的噪声诱导变异性较小，但明显大于听者内部变异性的量，听者内部变异性代表最小的影响。这些结果对辅音感知实验的设计有影响，并为未来的辅音感知模型提供了限制。
