Study of Relationship between Word Difficulty and Mandarin Phonic Autocorrelation Function in a Sound Field

• Main Authors: WU, MING-SHU, 吳銘書
• Other Authors: CHEN, CHIUNG-YAO
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2017
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/f36r82

碩士 === 朝陽科技大學 === 建築系建築及都市設計碩博士班 === 105 === According to past studies on word-intelligibility in connection with sound fields, it is possible to prove intelligibility performance at different locations in the same space with autocorrelation function of speech sounds in Mandarin, but impossible to amount to a predictive relationship that is representative of all sound fields. However, the cepstra of a few speech sounds can represent performance in articulating monosyllabic sounds in different sound fields respectively (Chen, 2012). For this study, it was therefore assumed that interfering factors existed in subjective intelligibility experiments. This study hypothesized that the subjective articulation of speech had been assumed to include subjective word-difficulty and objective intelligibility of monosyllabic sounds. This means it is necessary to separate objective intelligibility performance in space between intelligibility in space and articulation of speech. Therefore, this study investigated psychological word-difficulty using the monosyllabic sounds in past studies. The psychological experiment on difficulty of these monosyllabic sounds was conducted using artificial monosyllabic sounds that simulated three conditions: original sounds, addition of delay in the first reflection (15 ms, S/N = 0 dB) and masking by noise (S/N = 3 dB). The results showed the word-difficulty of these monosyllabic sounds had a great impact on word-intelligibility. In this study, observations were made based on four features ((0), e, 1, τ1) of autocorrelation function. It was found that word-difficulty was more identifiable when the monosyllabic sounds were interfered by the masking by noise and a higher connection (r = 0.83, R2 = 0.69, p < 0.005) could be found between φ1 [dB] and 1 [ms] which represented the fundamental frequency of a monosyllable. Keywords：autocorrelation function, word-intelligibility, word-difficulty