###### Abstract  
We previously investigated the perception of noise-vocoded speech to determine whether the temporal amplitude envelope (TAE) of speech plays an important role in the perception of linguistic information as well as non-linguistic information. However, it remains unclear if these TAEs also play a role in the urgency perception of non-linguistic information. In this paper, we comprehensively investigated whether the TAE of speech contributes to urgency perception. To this end, we compared noise-vocoded stimuli containing TAEs identical to those of original speech with those containing TAEs controlled by low-pass or high-pass filtering. We derived degrees of urgency from a paired comparison of the results and then used them as a basis to clarify the relationship between the temporal modulation components in TAEs of speech and urgency perception. Our findings revealed that (1) the perceived degrees of urgency of noise-vocoded stimuli are similar to those of the original, (2) significant cues for urgency perception are temporal modulation components of the noise-vocoded stimuli higher than the modulation frequency of 6 Hz, (3) additional significant cues for urgency perception are temporal modulation components of the noise-vocoded stimuli lower than the modulation frequency of 8 Hz, and (4) the TAE of the time-reversal speech is not likely to contain important cues for the perception of urgency. We therefore conclude that temporal modulation cues in the TAE of speech are a significant component in the perception of urgency. noise-vocoded speech; temporal modulation cue; urgency perception; temporal amplitude envelope +
Footnote †: journal:  
0000-0001-4000-0000-0000-0000-0000-0000-0000-0000-00000-00000-0000-00000-00000-00000-00000-00000-00000-00000-000000-00000-000000-00000-00000-00000-00000-000  
the source filter model related to the speech production system. These features are spectral and temporal fine structures (harmonicity and periodicity) related to the fundamental frequency, formants, spectral tilt, and temporal power fluctuation, and are essential for speech perception. On the other hand, the temporal amplitude envelope (TAE) and temporal fine structure (TFS) play important roles in auditory perception [1]. In particular, the role of TAE and TFS information was reviewed from aspects of auditory perception such as modulation perception and pitch perception. [PERSON] et al. reported that the cue of the TAE is more important for speech perception than that of the TFS [2]. A recent study by [PERSON] et al. also reported that the TAE or its modulation spectrum conveys linguistic information of speech [3]. We are, therefore, interested in understanding how the TAE of speech contributes to perception of non-linguistic information. Recent psychoacoustical studies based on a noise-vocoded speech (NVS) scheme have demonstrated that the TAE of speech is an important cue for speech recognition (speech perception regarding linguistic information, i.e., speech intelligibility) [4; 5; 6; 7]. NVS is generated by replacing the TFS of speech with band-limited noise while preserving the temporal amplitude envelope of speech, which enables the temporal characteristics to be preserved while drastically reducing the number of spectral characteristics. Several prior works have investigated the NVS scheme in the context of speech recognition. A work by [PERSON] et al. demonstrated that NVS with just four bands is sufficient to achieve a good speech recognition (vowel, consonant, and sentence recognition) [3]. [PERSON] et al. investigated the importance of modulation-frequency bands for speech recognition by applying low- and high-pass filtering on the TAE [8; 9], and [PERSON] et al. also reported that the TAE (or its modulation spectrum of speech) conveys the linguistic information of speech [3]. [PERSON] et al. attempted to elucidate the importance of temporal cues for phoneme recognition using NVS [10].