Using the Speech Transmission Index for predicting non-native speech intelligibility

Abstract

While the Speech Transmission Index (STI) is widely applied for prediction of speech intelligibility in room acoustics and telecommunication engineering, it is unclear how to interpret STI values when non-native talkers or listeners are involved. Based on subjectively measured psychometric functions for sentence intelligibility in noise, for populations of native and non-native communicators, a correction function for the interpretation of the STI is derived. This function is applied to determine the appropriate STI ranges with qualification labels ("bad"-"excellent"), for specific populations of non-natives. The correction function is derived by relating the non-native psychometric function to the native psychometric function by a single parameter (nu). For listeners, the nu parameter is found to be highly correlated with linguistic entropy. It is shown that the proposed correction function is also valid for conditions featuring bandwidth limiting and reverberation.