Cw. Turner et al., FREQUENCY-WEIGHTING FUNCTIONS FOR BROAD-BAND SPEECH AS ESTIMATED BY ACORRELATIONAL METHOD, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 104(3), 1998, pp. 1580-1585
The relative contributions of various regions of the frequency spectru
m to speech recognition were assessed with a correlational method [K.
A. Doherty and C. W. Turner, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 100, 3769-3773 (1996)
]. The speech materials employed were the 258-item set of the Nonsense
Syllable Test. The speech was filtered into four frequency bands and
a random level of noise was added to each band on each trial. A point
biserial correlation was computed between the signal-to-noise ratio in
each band on the trials and the listener's responses, and these corre
lations were then taken as estimates of the relative weights for each
frequency band. When the four bands were presented separately, the cor
relations for each band were approximately equal; however, when the fo
ur bands were presented in combination, the correlations were quite di
fferent from one another, implying that in the broadband case listener
s relied much more on some bands than on others. It is hypothesized th
at these differences reflect the way in which listeners combine and at
tend to speech information across various frequency regions. The frequ
ency-weighting functions as determined by this method were highly simi
lar across all subjects, suggesting that normal-hearing listeners use
similar frequency-weighting strategies in recognizing speech. (C) 1998
Acoustical Society of America. [S0001-4966(98)07108-2]