Aero-tactile integration in fricatives: Converting audio to air flow information for speech perception enhancement

Type of content
Conference Contributions - Published
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Publisher
ISCA
Journal Title
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Date
2014
Authors
Derrick, Donald
O'Beirne, Greg A.
De Rybel T
Hay J
Abstract

We follow up on research demonstrating that aero-tactile information can enhance or interfere with accurate auditory perception among uninformed and untrained perceivers [1, 2, 3]. We computationally extract aperiodic information from auditory recordings of speech, which represents turbulent air-flow produced from the lips [4, 5]. This extracted signal is used to drive a piezoelectric air-pump producing air-flow to the right temple simultaneous with presentation of auditory recordings. Using forced-choice experiments, we replicate previous results with stops, finding enhanced perception of /pa/ in /pa/ vs. /ba/ pairs, and /ta/ in /ta/ vs. /da/ pairs [1, 6, 2, 3]. We also found enhanced perception of /fa/ in /ba/ vs. /fa/ pairs, and /sha/ in /da/ vs. /sha/ pairs, demonstrating that air flow during fricative production contacting the skin can also enhance speech perception. The results show that aero-tactile information can be extracted from the audio signal and used to enhance speech perception of a large class of speech sounds found in many languages of the world.

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Citation
Derrick D, O'Beirne G, De Rybel T, Hay J (2014). Aero-tactile integration in fricatives: Converting audio to air flow information for speech perception enhancement. Singapore: 15th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (InterSpeech 2014). 14/09/2014-18/09/2014. INTERSPEECH 2014. 2580-2584.
Keywords
speech perception, aero-tactile integration, embodiment theory, audio perception enhancement
Ngā upoko tukutuku/Māori subject headings
ANZSRC fields of research
Fields of Research::47 - Language, communication and culture::4704 - Linguistics
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