International Workshop on Frontiers in Speech and Hearing Research, Technical Report of IEICE Japan, Vol. SP2005-166, pp. 21-24, 2006
The effects of speech-rate slowing for improving speech intelligibility in reverberant environments
Y. Nakata, Y. Murakami, N. Hodoshima, N. Hayashi, Y. Miyauchi, T. Arai and K. Kurisu
Abstract: This study investigated the effects of speech-rate slowing as a pre-processing technique under reverberant conditions. We conducted a perceptual test using speech-rate slowing with and without steady-state suppression (Arai et al., Proc. Autumn Meet. Acoust. Soc. Jpn., pp. 449f, 2001, and, Acoust. Sci. Tech., Vol.23, pp. 229f, 2002.) under several reverberant conditions. We hypothesized that speech-rate slowing with steady-state suppression yields greater improvement in speech intelligibility than simple speech-rate slowing. Our results indicated that simple speech-rate slowing improved speech intelligibility significantly at reverberation time of 2.0 s (from 45.2% to 57.7%) and speech-rate slowing after steady-state suppression significantly improved speech intelligibility at reverberation times of 2.0 s (from 45.2% to 70.2%) and 2.8 s (from 43.5% to 56.0%). Furthermore, speech-rate slowing with steady-state suppression was superior to simple speech-rate slowing for improving speech intelligibility at a reverberation time of 2.0 s (from 57.7% to 70.2%).
Keywords: Reverberation, Speech intelligibility, Speech-rate slowing, Steady-state suppression