Intelligibility of bandpass filtered speech: steepness of slopes required to eliminate transition band contributions

Despite the recognition that the steepness of filter slopes can play an important role in the intelligibility of bandpass speech, there has been no systematic examination of its importance. The present study used high orders of finite impulse response (FIR) filtering to produce slopes ranging from 150 to 10,000 dB/octave. The slopes flanked 1/3-octave passbands of everyday sentences having a center frequency of 1500 Hz (the region of highest intelligibility for the male speaker's voice). Presentation levels were approximately 75 and 45 dB. No significant differences were found for the two presentation levels. Average intelligibility scores ranged from 77% at 150 dB/octave down to the asymptotic intelligibility score of 12% at 4800 dB/octave. These results indicate that slopes of several thousand dB/octave may be required for accurate and unambiguous specification of the range of frequencies contributing to intelligibility of filtered speech. In addition, the extremely steep slopes are needed to ensure that none of the spectral components contributing to intelligibility has its relative importance diminished by spectral tilt.     

Intelligibilities of 1-octave rectangular bands spanning the speech spectrum when heard separately and paired

There is a need, both for speech theory and for many practical applications, to know the intelligibilities of individual passbands that span the speech spectrum when they are heard singly and in combination. While indirect procedures have been employed for estimating passband intelligibilities (e.g., the Speech Intelligibility Index), direct measurements have been blocked by the confounding contributions from transition band slopes that accompany filtering. A recent study has reported that slopes of several thousand dBA/octave produced by high-order finite impulse response filtering were required to produce the effectively rectangular bands necessary to eliminate appreciable contributions from transition bands [Warren et al., J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 115, 1292-1295 (2004)]. Using such essentially vertical slopes, the present study employed sentences, and reports the intelligibilities of their six 1-octave contiguous passbands having center frequencies from 0.25 to 8 kHz when heard alone, and for each of their 15 possible pairings.