Understanding speech in everyday conditions—Effects of room acoustics and noise

Understanding speech in noisy, indoor settings is a considerable challenge for listeners. Room acoustics, such as reverberation and heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) noise, all contribute to such challenges. In the current study, the effects of different backgrounds were examined in anechoic versus reverberant conditions at two different signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) were examined. 60 monolingual American English listeners transcribed spoken English sentences under different noisy conditions. Overall, we tested two acoustic conditions: anechoic and reverberant, reverberation time = 1.5 s, with four speech conditions (target speech only, or combined with HVAC noise, two-talker babble, or both) and two different SNRs (0 dB and -3 dB). Both the target and babble speech were female voices speaking in English. Complex backgrounds resulted in decreased performance, and the detrimental effects of such masking were accentuated by reverberation and lower SNR. This study serves as a basis for future research exploring the effects of room acoustics on speech intelligibility to gain a more wholistic understanding of speech perception under realistic conditions.