Contributions of the high-RMS-level segments to the intelligibility of mandarin sentences

Recent evidence suggests that segments carrying more spectral changes [e.g., consonant-vowel boundaries in the middle root-mean-square (RMS) level segments] are important to predict the intelligibility of English sentences. Nevertheless, considering the difference between Mandarin and English languages, it is hypothesized that the high-RMS-level segments might provide more perceptual information to the intelligibility of Mandarin speech. Two studies were conducted in this paper to assess the relative contributions of the high-RMS-level segments to the intelligibility of Mandarin sentences, i.e., speech perception and intelligibility prediction. Results show that 1) Mandarin sentences containing the high-RMS-level (i.e., above the overall RMS level of the whole utterance) segments are more intelligible (i.e., recognition rate up to 91%) than those with the middle-RMS-level segments; and 2) the high-RMS-level segments, which carry more vowel and tonal information, contribute more in predicting the intelligibility of Mandarin sentences in noise.