title: Prior listening exposure to a reverberant room improves open-set intelligibility of high-variability sentences.
abstract: Previous studies have demonstrated that speech understanding in reverberant rooms improves when listeners are given prior exposure to the room. Results from these room-adaptation studies are limited, however, because they were conducted with materials that are not representative of the high acoustic variability observed in speech signals during everyday communication. Here, room adaptation effects were measured using an open-set speech corpus with high lexical and indexical variability and virtual auditory space techniques to simulate binaural listening in rooms. Room adaptation effects of comparable magnitude to previous studies were observed, suggesting general importance for facilitating speech intelligibility in reverberation.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, University of Louisville, Louisville, Kentucky 40292, USA. nirmal.srinivasan@utdallas.edu
authors.forename: Nirmal Kumar
authors.initials: NK
authors.lastname: Srinivasan
authors.forename: Pavel
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Zahorik
mesh_terms: D000161:Acoustic Stimulation; D000162:Acoustics; D000223:Adaptation, Psychological; D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D001301:Audiometry, Pure-Tone; D001302:Audiometry, Speech; D001309:Auditory Threshold; D032882:Comprehension; D005160:Facility Design and Construction; D006801:Humans; D010470:Perceptual Masking; D013065:Speech Intelligibility; D013067:Speech Perception; D014732:Vibration; D055815:Young Adult