Speech intelligibility determined with various tests presented against noise

Abstract

The paper describes three Polish tests for assessment of speech intelligibility under noisy conditions: the matrix test, the sentence test and the digit triplet test. The matrix test contains semantically unpredictable sentences of fixed syntactical structures. This test is very useful for long-term intelligibility measurements and is applicable for subjects with profound hearing loss or cochlear implants users. The sentence test comprises utterances taken from everyday speech and aims at clinical speech intelligibility measurements. The digit triplet test contains sequences of three digits that are spoken separately and is aimed at screening measurements, especially via telephone. The statistical and phonemic properties of the tests are analyzed and compared. The correlation between results obtained in the respective tests and the tests applicability are also discussed.

Assessment of Speech Intelligibility in Free-field Sound Chamber at Different Signal Noise Ratios

“…Hence, speech-in-noise tests were developed. Speech-in-noise tests are also useful for adjusting classroom acoustics, setting hearing aids, hearing screening, and in the field of telecommunications (1). Monosyllabic/polysyllabic words or phrases may be used as the test material in speech tests.…”