Identification of vowels in noise and in reverberation produced by a female talker

Abstract

Vowels produced by a female talker were less identifiable than previously investigated vowels produced by a male talker [A. K. Nábělek and P. A. Dagenais, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 80, 741–748 (1986)]. Matrices of responses were obtained for normal-hearing and hearing-impaired subjects for three conditions: quiet, noise (S/N = 0 dB), and reverberation (T = 1.2 s). The vowels which were confused by normal-hearing subjects were also confused by hearing-impaired subjects. However, there were some pairs of vowels which were confused only by hearing-impaired subjects. There were also some differences between errors for the female voice and errors collected previously for the male voice. Differences in errors for the two talkers and two groups of subjects will be discussed. [Work supported by NIH.]