The Impact of Speech-Irrelevant Head Movements on Speech Intelligibility in Multi-Talker Environments

The Coordinate Response Measure corpus was used to measure how extraneous head movements affect speech intelligibility in a simulated cocktail party situation in which two, four, or six concurrent talkers were spatialized over headphones using virtual 3D audio. In two conditions, participants oscillated their head along the yaw axis, aided by a visual target tracking task. In one condition, the changes in the spatial location of the talkers were compensated for (i.e., the talkers were world-fixed) while in the other there was no such compensation (i.e., the talkers were head-fixed). In an additional baseline condition, participants did not move their heads. The results show that extraneous head movements do not impair speech intelligibility in a cocktail party situation.