Discrimination of Speech Quality Change Along Perceptual Dimensions (Study I)

This chapter describes a first experimental study about discrimination of speech quality change along separate perceptual quality dimensions (“discontinuity,” “noisiness,” “coloration”), as induced by different types of speech quality impairment (random frame loss, signal-correlated noise, bandpass filtering). It could be demonstrated that on average participants were distinguishing between those perceptual dimensions, with perceived degradation intensity being kept constant. Furthermore, evidence pointed toward the internal formation of distinct sensory and short-term perceptual quality references [Preliminary analyses of empirical data presented in this chapter have been conducted in Uhrig et al. (J. Neural Eng. 16(3):036009, 2019).]