Effects of noise, native language, age, and speaker gender on intelligibility in a large corpus of read speech

Abstract

Because speech communication takes place under noisy conditions, investigating the effect of noise on intelligibility is an essential part of understanding speech perception. One challenge is having sufficient numbers of speakers and unique sentences to control for sentence and speaker effects. In an online experiment, we used a corpus of 720 IEEE sentences read by 20 native English speakers (10 male, 10 female) from the Pacific Northwest (WA, OR, ID), which were embedded in three corpus-shaped noise conditions (−2, 0, + 2 dB). Stimuli were presented to undergraduate students at the Universities of Alberta and Washington using a design matrix which ensured that no listener heard a sentence more than once. Participants entered responses into a form which appeared immediately after the stimulus completed playing. Data collection is ongoing, but the current number of listeners is 1269, who responded to 120 items each. We use Levenshtein and Jaro distance measures to compare listener transcription accuracy. We investigate the effects of listener native language, age, and gender. We also investigate effects of the speaker’s gender on transcription accuracy. [Work supported by NIH NIDCD R01 DC006014.]