Enhancing Listener Strategies Using a Payoff Matrix in Speech-on-speech Masking Experiments

Abstract

Speech recognition was measured as a function of the target-to-masker ratio (TMR) with a syntactically similar speech masker. In the first experiment, the listeners were instructed to report the keywords from the target sentence. Data averaged across listeners showed a plateau in performance below 0 dB TMR when the masker and target sentences were from the same talker. The data showed that some listeners tended to report the target words at all TMRs in accordance with the instructions, while others reported keywords from the louder of the sentences, contrary to the instructions. In the second experiment, the stimuli were the same as in the first experiment, but the listeners were also instructed to avoid reporting the masker keywords, and a payoff matrix penalizing masker keywords and rewarding target keywords was used. In this experiment, the listeners reduced the number of reported masker keywords, and increased the number of reported target keywords overall, and the average data showed a local minimum at 0 dB TMR with same-talker maskers. The best overall performance with a same-talker masker was obtained with a level difference of 9 dB, where listeners achieved near perfect performance when the target was louder, and at least 80% correct performance when the target was the quieter of the two sentences.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Sep 03, 2015
Accession Number
ADA628394

Entities

People

  • Brian D. Simpson
  • David E. Kieras
  • Douglas S. Brungart
  • Eric R. Thompson
  • Gregory H. Wakefield
  • Nandini Iyer

Organizations

  • Air Force Research Laboratory

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Biomedical

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Air Force
  • Air Force Research Laboratories
  • Automated Speech Recognition
  • Computer Science
  • Computers
  • Data Sets
  • Electrical Engineering
  • Engineering
  • Feedback
  • Foreign Languages
  • Instructions
  • Intelligibility
  • Military Medicine
  • Military Research
  • Psychology
  • Recognition
  • Speech

Fields of Study

  • Education
  • Engineering

Readers

  • Brain and Cognitive Science; Experimental Psychology; Cognitive Neuroscience
  • Speech Processing/Speech Recognition.

Technology Areas

  • AI & ML
  • AI & ML - Information Retrieval