Tone Enhancement in Mandarin Speech for Listeners with Hearing Impairment

摘要

In this paper, a digital processing method is de- scribed for modifying tone contrast that is defined as the greatest difference in frequencies between peaks and valleys of pitch curves in monosyllable utterances. Under quiet and noisy backgrounds, modified Mandarin tone words were presented to hearing-im- paired Chinese listeners with moderate to severe sensorineural hearing loss. The listeners were asked to identify four alternative monosyllable words which were distinguishable by tones 1,2,3 and 4 respectively.