Pupillary correlates of auditory emotion recognition in older hearing-impaired listeners

Hearing-impaired (HI) individuals are shown to perform worse in auditory emotion recognition taskscompared to normal hearing individuals. It is still unclear if this is due to processing at low auditory levels or to categorisation of emotions that are involved in an experimental task(1). An index of emotion recognition can be observed in pupil dilations, which have recently been shown to dilate more for emotionally meaningful speech in comparison to emotionally neutral speech(2). We fitted 8 older HI participants, who had moderate to severe sloping high-frequency hearing loss, with frequency loweringenabled hearing aids for an acclimatisation period of 3-6 weeks. We recorded their pupil dilations in response to emotional speech with and without frequency lowering, during a passive-listening condition, both before and after the acclimatisation period.We also recorded their pupil dilations during an active-listening condition, which included a behavioural emotion identification task, after the acclimatisation period. We present here insights into the pupillary correlates of vocal emotion recognition inthe HI population and the impact of frequency lowering and the cognitive involvement elicited by the experimental situation on pupil dilation and emotion recognition capabilities in this population. (This project has received funding from the European Union’s H2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 675324

Development and structure of the VariaNTS corpus:A spoken Dutch corpus containing talker and linguistic variability

Speech perception and spoken word recognition are not only affected by what is being said, but also by who is speaking. Currently, publicly available corpora of spoken Dutch do not offer a wide variety of linguistic materials produced by multiple talkers. The VariaNTS (Variatie in Nederlandse Taal en Sprekers) corpus is a Dutch spoken corpus that was developed to maximize both linguistic and talker variability. It contains 1000 items from 11 linguistic subcategories, recorded by 8 male and 8 female native speakers of standard Dutch. The corpus contains audio recordings, orthographic transcriptions, item-specific details such as word frequencies, neighborhood densities and phonotactic probabilities, and talker details. The VariaNTS corpus aims to provide new materials to be used for broad assessment of speech perception and word recognition in Dutch clinical and academic settings

Map building with multiple range measurements using morphological surface profile extraction

A novel method is described for surface profile extraction based on morphological processing of multiple range sensor data. The approach taken is extremely flexible and robust, in addition to being simple and straightforward. It can deal with arbitrary numbers and configurations of range sensors as well as synthetic arrays. The method has the intrinsic ability to suppress spurious readings, crosstalk, and higher-order reflections, and process multiple reflections informatively. The essential idea of this work - the use of multiple range sensors combined with morphological processing - can be applied to different physical modalities of range sensing of vastly different scales and in many different areas. These may include radar, sonar, robotics, optical sensing and metrology, remote sensing, ocean surface exploration, geophysical exploration, and acoustic microscopy

Morphological surface profile extraction from multiple sonars

This paper presents a novel method for surface profile determination using multiple sensors. Our approach is based on morphological processing techniques to fuse the range data from multiple sensor returns in a manner that directly reveals the target surface profile. The method has the intrinsic ability of suppressing spurious readings due to noise, crosstalk, and higher-order reflections, as well as processing multiple reflections informatively. The algorithm is verified both by simulations and experiments in the laboratory by processing real sonar data obtained from a mobile robot. The results are compared to those obtained from a more accurate structured-light system, which is however more complex and expensive

Effect of F0 contours on top-down repair of interrupted speech

Top-down repair of interrupted speech can be influenced by bottom-up acoustic cues such as voice pitch (F0). This study aims to investigate the role of the dynamic information of pitch, i.e., F0 contours, in top-down repair of speech. Intelligibility of sentences interrupted with silence or noise was measured in five F0 contour conditions (inverted, flat, original, exaggerated with a factor of 1.5 and 1.75). The main hypothesis was that manipulating F0 contours would impair linking successive segments of interrupted speech and thus negatively affect top-down repair. Intelligibility of interrupted speech was impaired only by misleading dynamic information (inverted F0 contours). The top-down repair of interrupted speech was not affected by any F0 contours manipulation. (C) 2017 Acoustical Society of Americ

Automated speech audiometry:Can it work using open-source pre-trained Kaldi-NL automatic speech recognition?

A practical speech audiometry tool is the digits-in-noise (DIN) test for hearing screening of populations of varying ages and hearing status. The test is usually conducted by a human supervisor (e.g., clinician), who scores the responses spoken by the listener, or online, where a software scores the responses entered by the listener. The test has 24 digit-triplets presented in an adaptive staircase procedure, resulting in a speech reception threshold (SRT). We propose an alternative automated DIN test setup that can evaluate spoken responses whilst conducted without a human supervisor, using the open-source automatic speech recognition toolkit, Kaldi-NL. Thirty self-reported normal-hearing Dutch adults (19-64 years) completed one DIN+Kaldi-NL test. Their spoken responses were recorded, and used for evaluating the transcript of decoded responses by Kaldi-NL. Study 1 evaluated the Kaldi-NL performance through its word error rate (WER), percentage of summed decoding errors regarding only digits found in the transcript compared to the total number of digits present in the spoken responses. Average WER across participants was 5.0% (range 0 - 48%, SD = 8.8%), with average decoding errors in three triplets per participant. Study 2 analysed the effect that triplets with decoding errors from Kaldi-NL had on the DIN test output (SRT), using bootstrapping simulations. Previous research indicated 0.70 dB as the typical within-subject SRT variability for normal-hearing adults. Study 2 showed that up to four triplets with decoding errors produce SRT variations within this range, suggesting that our proposed setup could be feasible for clinical applications

The impact of speaking style on speech recognition in quiet and multi-talker babble in adult cochlear implant users

Contains fulltext : 216114pub.pdf (publisher's version ) (Open Access)8 p