The Contributions of Formants to the Intelligibility in Uyghur Sine-Wave Sentences

Formants play important roles in speech perception and recognition. Studies in English and Mandarin Chinese have shown that the first three formants contain sufficient intelligibility information. However, the effect of formants on Uyghur sentence intelligibility remains unknown. The present study investigated the effects of formants on Uyghur sentence intelligibility in quiet and various noise environments. We edited Uyghur sentences to obtain three conditions: retaining the first three formants, removing one formant, and retaining one formant trajectory. The results showed that the first three formants of Uyghur sentences also contain high intelligibility information. Among the individual formants, the first formant trajectory made the most significant contribution to intelligibility in both quiet and various noise conditions.