Abstract
The present study investigates the relationship between sentence intelligibility, band importance, and patterns of spectro-temporal covariation between frequency bands. Sixteen listeners transcribed sentences acoustically degraded to 5, 8, or 15 frequency bands. Half of the sentences retained the frequency bands that captured more signal covariance. The other half retained the bands accounting for less signal covariance. Sentence intelligibility was significantly higher in the high-covariance condition. Critically, this finding was predicted by differences in band importance across reconstructed sentences. These findings provide a mechanistic relationship between the contributions of signal covariance and band importance to sentence intelligibility.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Article number | 055204 |
| Journal | JASA Express Letters |
| Volume | 3 |
| Issue number | 5 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - May 1 2023 |
Funding
We thank all the research assistants, particularly Madison Rider and Eliana Spradling, for their dedication in conducting this study. We also want to thank the JASA EL Associate Editor Donald Derrick and two reviewers of the manuscript for their valuable comments and guidance on how to improve the original version of the manuscript. Finally, we want to thank Keith R. Kluender for his insightful comments. Research reported in this publication was supported by NIH/NIDCD Grant No. R01DC015504 (B.C.). The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Acoustics and Ultrasonics
- Music
- Arts and Humanities (miscellaneous)