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Evaluation Of The Importance Of Time-Frequency Contributions To Speech Intelligibility In Noise, Chengzhu Yu, Kamil K. Wójcicki, Philipos C. Loizou, John H. L. Hansen, Michael T. Johnson

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research and Publications

Recent studies on binary masking techniques make the assumption that each time-frequency (T-F) unit contributes an equal amount to the overall intelligibility of speech. The present study demonstrated that the importance of each T-F unit to speech intelligibility varies in accordance with speech content. Specifically, T-F units are categorized into two classes, speech-present T-F units and speech-absent T-F units. Results indicate that the importance of each speech-present T-F unit to speech intelligibility is highly related to the loudness of its target component, while the importance of each speech-absent T-F unit varies according to the loudness of its masker component. Two …