Abstract
A critical aspect of communicative competence is talker's ability to adapt the clarity of their speech in response to the challenges of a particular communicative situation. Previous work showed that talkers with elevated depressive symptoms were less successful in producing listener-oriented intelligibility-enhancing clear speech. The present study investigated intelligibility of speech produced in response to environmental noise (noise-adapted speech, NAS) in talkers with high depressive (HD) and low depressive (LD) symptoms. Sentence intelligibility was examined in the presence of speech-shaped noise (SSN) and 1-talker (1T) competing speech. Results revealed that NAS increased intelligibility for both talker groups and in both maskers. NAS intelligibility benefit was smaller for HD talkers than LD talkers in the SSN condition. Acoustic analyses showed that NAS was characterized by a decreased speaking rate, increased F0 mean and range, and increased energy in the 1–3 kHz range. Talkers with HD symptoms however produced these modifications significantly less compared to talkers with LD symptoms. Results provide further evidence that elevated depressive symptoms impact speaking style adaptations in response to various communicative barriers leading to lower intelligibility. The results have the potential to aid in clinical decision making for individuals with depression.
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