This Research Initiation Award will support Dr. Hansen's research in speech recognition under conditions of noise and stress. Initial simulations show that stress compensation can improve Markov-based recognition rates by as much as 42% (over a 60% decrease due to noise and stress). Dr. Hanson has collected a database of over 16,000 stressed and unstressed utterances, including speech from psychiatric patients and from people enduring high acceleration forces. His data also include examples of the Lombard effect, in which individuals modify their speech to overcome environmental noise.
