The perceptual organization of speech: Contributions of general and speech-specific factors

口语交际是人类的一项基本活动。然而，在日常生活中，我们在没有其他背景声音的情况下听到单个说话者的讲话是相当罕见的，因此我们的听觉系统面临着将来自一个来源的声音元素组合在一起并将它们与来自其他来源的声音元素分离的挑战。如果没有解决这个听觉场景分析问题，我们对语言和其他声音的感知就不会与产生它们的事件相对应。事实上，我们可以把注意力集中在一个人在其他谈话者在场的情况下说话，这表明我们的听觉感知系统通常能够成功地将来自复杂听觉场景中的声音元素组合在一起，并将它们与其他声源分离，但我们对如何实现这一点的理解仍然有限。大多数关于听觉场景分析的研究都集中在相对简单的声音上，并确定了声音元素分组的许多一般原则。然而，至少就目前的理解而言，这些原则似乎不足以解释语音的感知分组，因为语音具有多样且快速变化的声学特性。此外，语音是一种非常熟悉的刺激，因此我们的听觉系统有机会了解语音的特定属性，这些属性可能有助于成功地感知语音分组。这个项目的目的是探索我们的能力，从声音混合物中分离说话者的语音取决于通用的听觉分组原则，适用于所有的声音，有多少取决于分组原则，是特定的语音。该方法是生成人工语音样的刺激与精确控制的属性，混合目标话语与精心设计的竞争对手，提供替代分组的可能性，并测量如何操纵这些竞争对手的声学特性影响的能力，听众识别的目标话语的混合物。该项目的结果将提高我们对语音感知组织的理解，并建议如何提高助听器和自动语音识别器等设备在嘈杂环境中工作时的性能。

Spoken communication is a fundamental human activity. However, it is fairly uncommon in everyday life for us to hear the speech of a single talker in the absence of other background sounds, and so our auditory system is faced with the challenge of grouping together those sound elements that come from one source and segregating them from those arising from other sources. Without a solution to this auditory scene analysis problem, our perceptions of speech and other sounds would not correspond to the events that produced them. The fact that we can focus our attention on one person speaking in the presence of other talkers indicates that our auditory perceptual system is generally successful at grouping together the sound elements from a source in a complex auditory scene, and segregating them from other sound sources, but our understanding of how this is achieved remains limited. Most research on auditory scene analysis has focused on relatively simple sounds and has identified a number of general principles for the grouping of sound elements. However, at least as currently understood, these principles seem inadequate to explain the perceptual grouping of speech, because speech has acoustic properties that are diverse and rapidly changing. Furthermore, speech is a highly familiar stimulus, and so our auditory system has had the opportunity to learn about speech-specific properties that may assist in the successful perceptual grouping of speech. The aim of this project is to explore how much of our ability to segregate a talker's speech from a sound mixture depends on general-purpose auditory grouping principles that are applicable to all sounds, and how much depends on grouping principles that are specific to speech sounds. The approach is to generate artificial speech-like stimuli with precisely controlled properties, to mix target utterances with carefully designed competitors that offer alternative grouping possibilities, and to measure how manipulating the acoustic properties of these competitors affects the ability of listeners to recognize the target utterance in the mixture. The results of this project will improve our understanding of the perceptual organization of speech and suggest ways to improve the performance of devices such as hearing aids and automatic speech recognizers when they are operating in noisy environments.