Journal article
The influence of spectral characteristics of early reflections on speech intelligibility
The auditory system takes advantage of early reflections (ERs) in a room by integrating them with the direct sound (DS) and thereby increasing the effective speech level. In the present paper the benefit from realistic ERs on speech intelligibility in diffuse speech-shaped noise was investigated for normal-hearing and hearing-impaired listeners.
Monaural and binaural speech intelligibility tests were performed in a virtual auditory environment where the spectral characteristics of ERs from a simulated room could be preserved. The useful ER energy was derived from the speech intelligibility results and the efficiency of the ERs was determined as the ratio of the useful ER energy to the total ER energy.
Even though ER energy contributed to speech intelligibility, DS energy was always more efficient, leading to better speech intelligibility for both groups of listeners. The efficiency loss for the ERs was mainly ascribed to their altered spectrum compared to the DS and to the filtering by the torso, head, and pinna.
No binaural processing other than a binaural summation effect could be observed.
Language: | English |
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Publisher: | Acoustical Society of America |
Year: | 2011 |
Pages: | 996-1005 |
ISSN: | 15208524 , 00014966 and 01630962 |
Types: | Journal article |
DOI: | 10.1121/1.3609258 |
Acoustic Stimulation Adult Aged Analysis of Variance Auditory Pathways Auditory Threshold Case-Control Studies Facility Design and Construction Hearing Loss, Sensorineural Humans Middle Aged Models, Theoretical Noise Perceptual Masking Persons With Hearing Impairments Sound Spectrography Speech Acoustics Speech Intelligibility Speech Perception Speech Reception Threshold Test Young Adult