Rhetorical Analysis: George Wallace

First-place winner in the Short Essay category of the 2019 Emerging Writers Contest. This essay is a rhetorical analysis of George Wallace\u27s speech Segregation Today, Segregation Tomorrow, Segregation Forever

The impact of exploiting spectro-temporal context in computational speech segregation

The experimental data from the study: https://asa.scitation.org/doi/10.1121/1.5020273 Group 1 contains results, masks and audio from the models of the 16 GMM component segregation system Group 2 contains results, masks and audio from the models of the 64 GMM component segregation system There are three folders: Audio: The CLUE sentences that were used for the listener study IBM = Ideal Binary Mask, UP = UnProcessed, EBM = Estimated Binary Mask. The IBM and UP are stored in one of the configuration folders (Front-end), that is: Audio\Group1\Front-end\icra_01_10sec_matched\UP Audio\Group1\Front-end\icra_01_10sec_matched\IBM Audio\Group1\Front-end\icra_01_10sec_matched\EBM Results: The computed metrics for group 1 & 2 as well as Word Recognition Scores (WRSs) from the listener study BinaryMasks: a priori SNR masks, IBMs and EBMs from group 1 and 2. Developed with Matlab R2016a

Evaluation of the Importance of Time-Frequency Contributions to Speech Intelligibility in Noise

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 types of mask errors are also considered, which include miss and false alarm errors. Consistent with previous work, false alarm errors are shown to be more harmful to speech intelligibility than miss errors when the mixture signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is below 0 dB. However, the relative importance between the two types of error is conditioned on the SNR level of the input speech signal. Based on these observations, a mask-based objective measure, the loudness weighted hit-false, is proposed for predicting speech intelligibility. The proposed objective measure shows significantly higher correlation with intelligibility compared to two existing mask-based objective measures

Effects of Aging on Behavioral Measures of Listening Effort

Dissertation (Ph.D.) - Indiana University, Department of Speech and Hearing Sciences, 2020Difficulty with speech communication in noise is a common problem among elderly individuals. Older adults often report challenges with understanding speech, particularly in noisy environments. Growing evidence suggests that cognitive effort is a significant factor in speech understanding in noise. Although hearing loss is commonly experienced by older adults, according to prevalence estimates, about 4 in 10 adults age 65 and over will have impaired hearing. Older adults also experience decline in a number of cognitive abilities. The focus here was on aging alone to eliminate hearing loss as a contributing factor. The primary focus of this study was to measure cognitive effort (listening effort) in young and older adults with normal hearing while completing a speech in noise task. This study also examined some methodological issues for the measurement of listening effort. The most common means of behavioral assessment of listening effort is through use of a dual-task paradigm (DTP), whereby participants perform a “primary” speech-perception task along with a “secondary” task that does not involve speech perception. The two tasks can be administered concurrently or sequentially. It is not known whether DTPs administered sequentially and concurrently in the same person will yield similar results. The primary task in the DTP used here was a speech-identification task with a target talker and two competing talkers; the secondary task was either concurrent or sequential recall of a portion of the target message. Another methodological issue examined was the influence of the gender of the competing talker, either the same as (male) or different from (female) the target talker. The primary finding was that, when the performance of young and older adults was equated at baseline in the DTP, few effects of age on listening effort were seen. Differences between the concurrent and sequential conditions emerged, however, including a larger dual-task effect on the secondary task, slower response times, and poorer performance overall for the sequential condition. Consistent with previous findings in the literature, performance on the speech segregation portion of the DTP was generally better when the genders of the target and competing talkers differed