The Influence of High-Frequency Envelope Information on Low-Frequency Vowel Identification in Noise

PLoS One. 2016 Jan 5;11(1):e0145610. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0145610. eCollection 2016.

Abstract

Vowel identification in noise using consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) logatomes was used to investigate a possible interplay of speech information from different frequency regions. It was hypothesized that the periodicity conveyed by the temporal envelope of a high frequency stimulus can enhance the use of the information carried by auditory channels in the low-frequency region that share the same periodicity. It was further hypothesized that this acts as a strobe-like mechanism and would increase the signal-to-noise ratio for the voiced parts of the CVCs. In a first experiment, different high-frequency cues were provided to test this hypothesis, whereas a second experiment examined more closely the role of amplitude modulations and intact phase information within the high-frequency region (4-8 kHz). CVCs were either natural or vocoded speech (both limited to a low-pass cutoff-frequency of 2.5 kHz) and were presented in stationary 3-kHz low-pass filtered masking noise. The experimental results did not support the hypothesized use of periodicity information for aiding low-frequency perception.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Acoustic Stimulation
  • Adult
  • Cues
  • Female
  • Humans
  • Male
  • Noise*
  • Perceptual Masking / physiology
  • Phonetics
  • Pitch Perception / physiology*
  • Random Allocation
  • Speech Acoustics*
  • Speech Discrimination Tests
  • Speech Intelligibility / physiology*
  • Voice

Grants and funding

This study was supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) within the Sonderforschungsbereich SFB/TRR31, “The Active Auditory System.” The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.