Qi Beier, Mao Yitao, Liu Jiaxing, Liu Bo, Xu Li
Department of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery, Beijing Tongren Hospital, Capital Medical University, Beijing, China.
Department of Radiology, Xiangya Hospital, Central South University, Changsha, Hunan, China.
J Acoust Soc Am. 2017 May;141(5):3022. doi: 10.1121/1.4982247.
Previous studies have shown that lexical tone perception in quiet relies on the acoustic temporal fine structure (TFS) but not on the envelope (E) cues. The contributions of TFS to speech recognition in noise are under debate. In the present study, Mandarin tone tokens were mixed with speech-shaped noise (SSN) or two-talker babble (TTB) at five signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs; -18 to +6 dB). The TFS and E were then extracted from each of the 30 bands using Hilbert transform. Twenty-five combinations of TFS and E from the sound mixtures of the same tone tokens at various SNRs were created. Twenty normal-hearing, native-Mandarin-speaking listeners participated in the tone-recognition test. Results showed that tone-recognition performance improved as the SNRs in either TFS or E increased. The masking effects on tone perception for the TTB were weaker than those for the SSN. For both types of masker, the perceptual weights of TFS and E in tone perception in noise was nearly equivalent, with E playing a slightly greater role than TFS. Thus, the relative contributions of TFS and E cues to lexical tone perception in noise or in competing-talker maskers differ from those in quiet and those to speech perception of non-tonal languages.
先前的研究表明，安静环境下的声调感知依赖于声学时间精细结构（TFS），而不是包络（E）线索。TFS对噪声中语音识别的贡献仍存在争议。在本研究中，汉语声调音节与语音形状噪声（SSN）或双说话者嘈杂声（TTB）以五种信噪比（SNR；-18至+6 dB）混合。然后使用希尔伯特变换从30个频段中的每个频段提取TFS和E。针对不同SNR下相同声调音节的声音混合，创建了25种TFS和E的组合。20名听力正常、以汉语为母语的听众参与了声调识别测试。结果表明，随着TFS或E中信噪比的增加，声调识别性能提高。TTB对声调感知的掩蔽效应比SSN弱。对于这两种类型的掩蔽声，TFS和E在噪声中声调感知的感知权重几乎相等，E比TFS的作用稍大。因此，TFS和E线索对噪声或竞争性说话者掩蔽声中词汇声调感知的相对贡献不同于安静环境下以及对非声调语言语音感知的贡献。
