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R E Remez

Publications and source records attributed to R E Remez.

14 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed2001

Audio-visual perception of sinewave speech in an adult cochlear implant user: a case study.

OBJECTIVE: The purpose of this case study was to investigate multimodal perceptual coherence in speech perception in an exceptionally good postlingually deafened cochlear implant user. His ability to perceive sinewave replicas of spoken sentences, and the extent to which he integrated sensory information from multimodal sources was compared with a group of adult normal-hearing listeners to determine the contribution of natural auditory quality in the use of electrocochlear stimulation. DESIGN: The patient, "Mr. S," transcribed sinewave sentences of natural speech under audio-only (AO), visual-only (VO), and audio-visual (A+V) conditions. His performance was compared with the data collected from 25 normal-hearing adults. RESULTS: Although normal-hearing participants performed better than Mr. S for AO sentences (65% versus 53% syllables correct), Mr. S was superior for VO sentences (43% versus 18%). For A+V sentences, Mr. S's performance was comparable with the normal-hearing group (90% versus 86%). An estimate of the amount of visual enhancement, R, obtained from seeing the talker's face showed that Mr. S derived a larger gain from the additional visual information than the normal-hearing controls (78% versus 59%). CONCLUSIONS: The findings from this case study of an exceptionally good cochlear implant user suggest that he is perceiving the sinewave sentences on the basis of coherent variation from multimodal sensory inputs, and not on the basis of lipreading ability alone. Electrocochlear stimulation is evidently useful in multimodal contexts because it preserves dynamic speech-like variation, despite the absence of speech-like auditory qualities.

Adult↗
PubMed2001

On the bistability of sine wave analogues of speech.

Our studies revealed two stable modes of perceptual organization, one based on attributes of auditory sensory elements and another based on attributes of patterned sensory variation composed by the aggregation of sensory elements. In a dual-task method, listeners attended concurrently to both aspects, component and pattern, of a sine wave analogue of a word. Organization of elements was indexed by several single-mode tests of auditory form perception to verify the perceptual segregation of either an individual formant of a synthetic word or a tonal component of a sinusoidal word analogue. Organization of patterned variation was indexed by a test of lexical identification. The results show the independence of the perception of auditory and phonetic form, which appear to be differently organized concurrent effects of the same acoustic cause.

Humans↗
PubMed1997

Talker identification based on phonetic information.

Accounts of the identification of words and talkers commonly rely on different acoustic properties. To identify a word, a perceiver discards acoustic aspects of an utterance that are talker specific, forming an abstract representation of the linguistic message with which to probe a mental lexicon. To identify a talker, a perceiver discards acoustic aspects of an utterance specific to particular phonemes, creating a representation of voice quality with which to search for familiar talkers in long-term memory. In 3 experiments, sinewave replicas of natural speech sampled from 10 talkers eliminated natural voice quality while preserving idiosyncratic phonetic variation. Listeners identified the sinewave talkers without recourse to acoustic attributes of natural voice quality. This finding supports a revised description of speech perception in which the phonetic properties of utterances serve to identify both words and talkers.

Adult↗
PubMed1997

Perceiving the sex and identity of a talker without natural vocal timbre.

The personal attributes of a talker perceived via acoustic properties of speech are commonly considered to be an extralinguistic message of an utterance. Accordingly, accounts of the perception of talker attributes have emphasized a causal role of aspects of the fundamental frequency and coarse-grain acoustic spectra distinct from the detailed acoustic correlates of phonemes. In testing this view, in four experiments, we estimated the ability of listeners to ascertain the sex or the identity of 5 male and 5 female talkers from sinusoidal replicas of natural utterances, which lack fundamental frequency and natural vocal spectra. Given such radically reduced signals, listeners appeared to identify a talker's sex according to the central spectral tendencies of the sinusoidal constituents. Under acoustic conditions that prevented listeners from determining the sex of a talker, individual identification from sinewave signals was often successful. These results reveal that the perception of a talker's sex and identity are not contingent and that fine-grain aspects of a talker's phonetic production can elicit individual identification under conditions that block the perception of voice quality.

Female↗
PubMed1996

Critique: auditory form and gestural topology in the perception of speech.

Some influential accounts of speech perception have asserted that the goal of perception is to recover the articulatory gestures that create the acoustic signal, while others have proposed that speech perception proceeds by a method of acoustic categorization of signal elements. These accounts have been frustrated by difficulties in identifying a set of primitive articulatory constituents underlying speech production, and a set of primitive acoustic-auditory elements underlying speech perception. An argument by Lindblom favors an account of production and perception based on the auditory form of speech and its cognitive elaboration, rejecting the aim of defining a set of articulatory primitives by appealing to theoretical principle, while recognizing the empirical difficulty of identifying a set of acoustic or auditory primitives. An examination of this thesis found opportunities to defend some of its conclusions with independent evidence, but favors a characterization of the constituents of speech perception as linguistic rather than as articulatory or acoustic.

Cognition↗
PubMed1993

On the intonation of sinusoidal sentences: contour and pitch height.

A sinusoidal replica of a sentence evokes a clear impression of intonation despite the absence of the primary acoustic correlate of intonation, the fundamental frequency. Our previous studies employed a test of differential similarity to determine that the tone analog of the first formant is a probable acoustic correlate of sinusoidal sentence intonation. Though the typical acoustic and perceptual effects of the fundamental frequency and the first formant differ greatly, our finding was anticipated by reports that harmonics of the fundamental within the dominance region provide the basis for impressions of pitch more generally. The frequency extent of the dominance region roughly matches the range of variability typical of the first formant. Here, we report two additional tests with sinusoidal replicas to identify the relevant physical attributes of the first formant analog that figure in the perception of intonation. These experiments determined (1) that listeners represent sinusoidal intonation as a pattern of relative pitch changes correlated with the frequency of the tonal replica of the first formant, and (2) that sinusoidal sentence intonation is probably a close match to the pitch height of the first formant tone. These findings show that some aspects of auditory pitch perception apply to the perception of intonation; and, that impressions of pitch of a multicomponent nonharmonic signal can be derived from the component within the dominance region.

Female↗
PubMed1987

Perceptual normalization of vowels produced by sinusoidal voices.

When listeners hear a sinusoidal replica of a sentence, they perceive linguistic properties despite the absence of short-time acoustic components typical of vocal signals. Is this accomplished by a postperceptual strategy that accommodates the anomalous acoustic pattern ad hoc, or is a sinusoidal sentence understood by the ordinary means of speech perception? If listeners treat sinusoidal signals as speech signals however unlike speech they may be, then perception should exhibit the commonplace sensitivity to the dimensions of the originating vocal tract. The present study, employing sinusoidal signals, raised this issue by testing the identification of target /bVt/, or b-vowel-t, syllables occurring in sentences that differed in the range of frequency variation of their component tones. Vowel quality of target syllables was influenced by this acoustic correlate of vocal-tract scale, implying that the perception of these nonvocal signals includes a process of vocal-tract scale, implying that the perception of these nonvocal signals includes a process of vocal-tract normalization. Converging evidence suggests that the perception of sinusoidal vowels depends on the relation among component tones and not on the phonetic likeness of each tone in isolation. The findings support the general claim that sinusoidal replicas of natural speech signals are perceptible phonetically because they preserve time-varying information present in natural signals.

Adult↗
PubMed1983

Coding of the speech spectrum in three time-varying sinusoids.

Recent perceptual experiments with normal adult listeners show that phonetic information can readily be conveyed by sinewave replicas of speech signals. These tonal patterns are made of three sinusoids set equal in frequency and amplitude to the respective peaks of the first three formants of natural-speech utterances. Unlike natural and most synthetic speech, the spectrum of sinusoidal patterns contains neither harmonics nor broadband formants, and is identified as grossly unnatural in voice timbre. Despite this drastic recoding of the short-time speech spectrum, listeners perceive the phonetic content if the temporal properties of spectrum variation are preserved. These observations suggest that phonetic perception may depend on properties of coherent spectrum variation, a second-order property of the acoustic signal, rather than any particular set of acoustic elements present in speech signals.

Humans↗
PubMed1981

Speech perception without traditional speech cues.

A three-tone sinusoidal replica of a naturally produced utterance was identified by listeners, despite the readily apparent unnatural speech quality of the signal. The time-varying properties of these highly artificial acoustic signals are apparently sufficient to support perception of the linguistic message in the absence of traditional acoustic cues for phonetic segments.

Auditory Perception↗