J. Acoust. Soc. Am., Vol. 120, No. 5, Pt. 2, pp. 3346-3347, 2006
Energy suppression of steady-state portions of vowels while maintaining the energy of consonants better improves speech intelligibility for elderly listeners in reverberation
Y. Miyauchi and T. Arai
Abstract: In a reverberant environment, overlap-masking renders speech perception difficult. Arai itet al. proposed that energy suppression of steady-state portions of speech improves speech intelligibility with young subjects [Acoust. Sci. Technol. 23, 229?232 (2002)]. Audibility degrades with age. Therefore, reverberation can be a more critical barrier to speech perception by elderly listeners. To investigate the effect of suppressing reverberation for elderly people, a listening test was conducted with 25 elderly subjects (mean age: 73.3 years) using the following three types of speech: (a) speech without energy suppression of steady-state portion, (b) speech with the suppression of steady-state portions of speech, and (c) speech with the suppression only of vowels, while maintaining the energy of consonants. As expected, speech intelligibility by method (b) (46.7%) was markedly improved from (a) (42.2%), but method (c) (52.0%) improved it more. Because the energy of consonants is less than that of vowels, overlap-masking attendant on previous vowels would largely affect perception of subsequent consonants. These results suggest that suppressing the steady-state portions of vowels while maintaining the energy of consonants serves elderly persons well to improve speech intelligibility in a reverberant environment. [Work supported by JSPS.KAKENHI (16203041).]