Effects of single-channel speech enhancement algorithms on Chinese Putonghua intelligibility

Recent studies have shown that the state-of-the-art single-channel speech enhancement algorithms can not improve,usually decrease,the English speech intelligibility in most listening conditions.This study investigates the effects of single-channel speech enhancement algorithms on a tonal language intelligibility:Chinese Putonghua.Noisy speeches were processed by five different single-channel speech enhancement algorithms in various conditions and then presented to ten normal hearing listeners for syllables identification.Recognition results of Chinese Putonghua syllables provided by listeners show that the tested speech enhancement algorithms cannot improve the Chinese Putonghua speech intelligibility in the tested listening conditions,which might be partially caused by the“phoneme errors”.Moreover, the comparisons of the recognition results for Chinese Putonghua we obtained and those for English got from previous studies indicate that some speech enhancement algorithms yield different effects on Chinese Putonghua and English speech intelligibilities.