Review of speech intelligibility measures
Chaslav V. Pavlovic · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1990
Currently, various procedures exist for physical measurements of speech intelligibility (AI, STI, RASTI, etc.). A large majority of them are either based on or use some concepts of the articulation theory. In this talk the articulation theory will be critically reviewed and parameters and procedures that give best results will be recommended. The specific recommendations will vary depending on the application. Therefore, the result will be a global and unified model incorporating the best elements of the contemporary procedures. Among the variables that will be discussed are the basic theoretical foundations of the theory, speech dynamic range, importance of various frequencies to speech intelligibility, ways to account for the effects of various distortion types on speech intelligibility, accurate measurement of the prediction parameters, possible errors, etc. Finally, the meaning of the term “speech intelligibility” will be reexamined. It will be hypothesized that the intelligibility of speech that occurs in daily communication activities is better specified by physical measures than by any speech recognition testing. In fact, in many circumstances, the latter could be completely misleading.