Difference of phonemic restoration between professional and non-experts’ voices

Abstract

It is generally thought that the voices of professional announcers are clearer and easier to hear than those of non-professional speakers. This study examined the perceptual mechanisms involved in the higher intelligibility of professional announcers’ voice with the focus on perceptual restoration. The intelligibility of the professional announcers was 10% to 30% higher than that of the non-professional speakers in noisy conditions. The effects of the formants on the higher intelligibility were experimentally examined using test words with one of the frequency bands corresponding to the first to third formants removed. When the formant component was removed, performance declined for both speakers, whereas that of the professional announcers was maintained with noise. An additional experiment showed that a missing component in a professional announcers’ voice is perceptually restored by adding noise. It is thus likely that the voices of professional announcers are rich in phonological cues, enabling phonological restoration to be achieved by adding noise. This may be one of the reasons why the higher intelligibility of their voices in noise.