Relationship between Intelligibility and autocorrelation factors of Japanese monosyllables

Amplified speech sound by a hearing aid can improve the speech intelligibility for conductive hearing loss, while improve partly for sensorineural hearing loss. Although the indiscernible consonants in Japanese monosyllables have been identified, it is still unclear which acoustical feature in the consonants causes the difficulty on hearing. Therefore, the aim of this study is to clarify an influential factor on the speech intelligibility using autocorrelation function (ACF), which can capture temporal features of signals. The ACF factors were compared with percent articulations obtained by a Japanese speech intelligibility test (n = 144). The time-series factors were calculated by running ACF along a monosyllable, and the median values of the ACF factors were represented. As results, an effective duration (τe [ms]) of the ACF was correlated with the averaged percent articulations among the consonants (r = 0.87, p