ISCA Archive Interspeech 2016
ISCA Archive Interspeech 2016

Effects of Urgent Speech and Preceding Sounds on Speech Intelligibility in Noisy and Reverberant Environments

Nao Hodoshima

Public-address (PA) announcements are used to convey emergency information; however, noise and reverberation sometimes make announcements in public spaces unintelligible. Therefore, the present study investigated how combinations of speech spoken in an urgent style and preceding sounds affect speech intelligibility and perceived urgency in noisy and reverberant environments. Sentences were spoken in normal or urgent styles and preceded by either two sounds (siren sound or ocean wave-like sound) or no sounds. Eighteen young participants carried out word identification test and rated perceived urgency on five-point scales in noisy and reverberant environments. The results showed that the urgently spoken speech had significantly higher speech intelligibility than the normal speech. The urgently spoken speech preceded by the wave-like sound showed significantly higher speech intelligibility than normal speech without sounds, normal speech preceded by the siren sound, and urgently spoken speech preceded by the siren sound. The results also demonstrated that the perceived urgency was rated higher for the urgently spoken speech than that for the normal speech, regardless of the types of preceding sounds. These results suggest that appropriate combinations of speaking styles and alerting sounds will increase the intelligibility of emergency PA announcements.