Talker differences in clear and conversational speech: Preliminary data with monosyllabic words

Abstract

Several studies have shown that when a talker is instructed to speak as though talking to a hearing-impaired person, the resulting clear speech is significantly more intelligible than typical conversational speech. A recent study of 41 talkers [S. H. Ferguson, J. Acoust. Soc. Am., in press] demonstrated that for normal-hearing listeners identifying vowels in noise, the amount of improvement talkers achieve by speaking clearly varies widely. The current pilot experiment begins to extend this line of research to meaningful materials using two talkers from the Ferguson database, one male and one female. While the clear speech vowel intelligibility benefit was similar for these two talkers, overall vowel intelligibility was greater for the female talker than for the male talker. Monosyllabic words produced in clear and conversational speech by these talkers were excised from the sentences in which they were recorded and presented in noise for identification by young, normal-hearing listeners and elderly listeners with hearing impairment. These data will provide important information about the relationship between vowel intelligibility and overall speech intelligibility. Results will be discussed in this light as well as in terms of expected talker variability in the clear speech effect for meaningful materials. [Database development supported by NIHDCD-02229.]