Effect of Sound Reproduction System and Listening Condition on Subjective Chinese Speech Intelligibility Assessment

Speech intelligibility (SI) is an important index for design of speech purpose hall. Subjective speech intelligibility assessment is the ultimate criterion. In the present work, by using the loudspeaker and the earphone reproduction systems, the auralization technique, instead of sitting in hall, is applied to obtain the speech intelligibility scores under the diotic and the dichotic listening conditions, no matter the hall is built already or not. The results show that there is no difference between the speech intelligibility scores using the both sound reproduction systems. Sound reproduction systems have no significant effect on the speech intelligibility scores. However, the room acoustical characteristic in listening position and the listening condition have significant effect on the speech intelligibility scores. The smaller C ₅₀(AVG) is at listening position, the more the difference between the results under the both listening conditions. Speech intelligibility scores under the dichotic listening condition are higher than that under the diotic listening condition at these 28 listening positions.