The effect of simulated room acoustic parameters on the intelligibility and perceived reverberation of monosyllabic words and sentences.

Individual acoustic parameters of reverberation have the potential to affect both the intelligibility of speech and the degree of perceived reverberation. The current experiments used monaural acoustic simulations to investigate the effect of reverberation time (RT) and direct-to-reverberant ratio (DRR) on word and sentence intelligibility at different levels of analysis (phonemes, words, and sentences). Perceived reverberation and recall of sentences were also assessed. Intelligibility and perceived reverberation decreased with increasing RT and decreasing DRR (particularly between 0 and −10 dB). Results indicate consistent effects of both RT and DRR on the intelligibility and perceived reverberation of words and sentences.