Speakers adjust their voice when talking in noise, which is known as Lombard speech. These acoustic adjustments facilitate speech comprehension in noise relative to plain speech (i.e., speech produced in quiet). However, exactly which characteristics of Lombard speech drive this intelligibility benefit in noise remains unclear. This study assessed the contribution of enhanced amplitude modulations to the Lombard speech intelligibility benefit by demonstrating that (1) native speakers of Dutch in the Nijmegen Corpus of Lombard Speech produce more pronounced amplitude modulations in noise vs in quiet; (2) more enhanced amplitude modulations correlate positively with intelligibility in a speech-in-noise perception experiment; (3) transplanting the amplitude modulations from Lombard speech onto plain speech leads to an intelligibility improvement, suggesting that enhanced amplitude modulations in Lombard speech contribute towards intelligibility in noise. Results are discussed in light of recent neurobiological models of speech perception with reference to neural oscillators phase-locking to the amplitude modulations in speech, guiding the processing of speech.
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February 2020
February 03 2020
Enhanced amplitude modulations contribute to the Lombard intelligibility benefit: Evidence from the Nijmegen Corpus of Lombard Speech
Hans Rutger Bosker;
Hans Rutger Bosker
a)
1
Psychology of Language department, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics
, Wundtlaan 1, P.O. Box 310, 6500 AH, Nijmegen, The Netherlands
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Martin Cooke
Martin Cooke
b)
2
Language and Speech Laboratory, Universidad del País Vasco
, calle Justo Vélez de Elorriaga 1, Vitoria, 01006, Spain
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a)
Also at: Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Radboud University, Nijmegen, the Netherlands. Electronic mail: HansRutger.Bosker@mpi.nl, ORCID: 0000-0002-2628-7738.
b)
Also at: Ikerbasque (Basque Science Foundation), Bilbao, Spain.
J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 147, 721–730 (2020)
Article history
Received:
July 18 2019
Accepted:
January 10 2020
Citation
Hans Rutger Bosker, Martin Cooke; Enhanced amplitude modulations contribute to the Lombard intelligibility benefit: Evidence from the Nijmegen Corpus of Lombard Speech. J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 1 February 2020; 147 (2): 721–730. https://doi.org/10.1121/10.0000646
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