The role of glimpses with different energy in speech-in-noise recognition

Abstract

Listeners can understand speech in noise by “glimpsing” some of the speech regions less affected by noise. This study investigates the contributions of those spectro-temporal regions, known as glimpses, at different energy levels to speech intelligibility in noise. Two listening experiments were conducted to examine the intelligibility of speech in different glimpse compositions in two types of noise. The results suggest that glimpsed spectro-temporal regions with energy above the mean noise level are the primary cue for speech perception in noise, and that listeners can use less-robust cues until at least 15 dB below the glimpsing threshold.