Children’s perception of clear-speech vowels.
Dorothy Leone, Sih-Chiao Hsu, Miriam Baigorri, Gemma Moya‐Galé, Erika S. Levy · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2011
Clear speech is an intelligibility-enhancing mode of speech that increases identification accuracy in various listening populations [e.g., Picheny et al. (1986)]. Children identify words more accurately in clear-speech sentences in noise than in conversational-speech sentences in noise [Bradlow et al. (2003)]. At the segmental level, adults identify clear-speech vowels in noise significantly more accurately than conversational vowels in noise, with some vowels benefiting more from clear speech than others [Ferguson and Kewley-Port (2002)]. However, little is known about the clear speech intelligibility benefit for vowels in noise as perceived by children. This study examined children’s identification of clear-speech vowels in noise. Four female adult speakers produced (/i-ε-æ-ʌ/) in carrier phrases in conversational and clear speech. Stimuli were then presented in speech-shaped noise to school-aged children at two signal-to-noise ratios. Children’s repetition of key words were recorded and coded by naive adult listeners. Results revealed children’s poorer vowel identification with decreased signal-to-noise ratio, and a greater clear-speech advantage in the poorer SNR, although listener-variability was evident. These data provide preliminary support for adults’ use of clear speech when communicating with children in adverse listening conditions.