Speech Research and Instrumentation

The final report reviews the progress made during the approximate eight-and-a-half-year life of the contract. In the early phase, the focus lay on the development of speech research instrumentation and led to the construction of digital equipment for the analysis, reproduction and synthesis of speech as well as for the processing of electromyographic data derived from muscles of the human articulatory system. Through the latter phase of the contract research efforts were drawn more exclusively toward the study of human performance with speech signals. Here the concerns were to discover whether individual differences in listeners' perceptual skills could be identified and whether our growing knowledge of the psycho-acoustic properties of speech could be exploited in an effort to improve listeners' performances on speech in noise. See also report dated Feb 75, AD-A007 342.