Audiovisual enhancement and single-word intelligibility in children's speech

Abstract

It is nearly axiomatic that audiovisual (AV) speech is more intelligible than audio-only (A-only) speech, particularly when the speech is presented in a challenging listening environment, such as in background noise [e.g., MacLeod and Summerfield, Br. J. Audiol., 2 (1987)]. Surprisingly, there has been only limited exploration of differences between individual talkers in the intelligibility advantage of their AV speech over their A-only speech. In this work, we ask whether different age groups of speakers elicit systematically different AV benefits in speech intelligibility tasks. A recent study examined whether children and adults' speech elicits similar AV benefits for sentence intelligibility (Karisny et al., J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 146). In that study, children's speech elicited smaller AV benefits than adults' speech, though this comparison was complicated by suboptimal choice of different signal-to-noise ratios to equate the groups' intelligibility in A-only conditions. The current study follows up on this work by examining single-word intelligibility in the same talkers, using a single SNR for both groups. Data collection is ongoing. Results will help us understand the role of individual-speaker variation on the magnitude of AV benefit.