Title
The effects of temporal acceleration and deceleration on AV speech perception.
Abstract
Modern signal processing techniques make it possible to speed up or slow down the apparent speaking rate of an audio-visual (AV) speech stimulus, but little is known about the effect this processing might have on the intelligibility of AV speech sig- nals. In this experiment, AV recordings of phrases from the Modified Rhyme Test (MRT) were accelerated or decelerated by first changing the duration of the audio signal using the PSOLA speech processing algorithm (PRAAT)and then chang- ing the frame rate of the AVI file to maintain synchronization of the audio and visual stimuli. The original speech phrases were recorded at either a fast speaking rate (roughly 5 sylla- bles per second (syl/s)), a normal conversational rate (3.3 syl/s), and a slow rate (1.7 syl/s). The results of a preliminary ex- periment showed that conversational-rate AV recordings that were shifted in speed to match the slow or fast recordings pro- duced the same audio and audiovisual intelligibility levels as the original recordings. However, some degradation in perfor- mance occurred when the fast recordings were slowed down or the slow recordings were speeded up. In the main experiment, the phrases were processed to set their speaking rates to eight different fixed values ranging from 0.6 syl/s to 20 syl/s. The re- sults show that AV advantages were preserved at speaking rates as fast as 12.5 syl/s, but that they disappeared when the rate was increased to20 syl/s. Notably, the resultsalso failed to show any improvement in AV performance for phrases presented slower than their original speaking rates. Index Terms: time compressed speech, speaking rate, intelligi- bility, modified rhyme test
Year
Venue
Field
2007
AVSP
Psychology,Speech recognition,Acceleration,Acoustics,Speech perception
DocType
Citations 
PageRank 
Conference
1
0.42
References 
Authors
4
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Douglas S. Brungart1285.63
Virginie van Wassenhove212911.71
Eugene Brandewie310.42
Griffin D. Romigh4103.40