Issues in the perception of multiple speech sources under reverberant listening conditions
Chris J. Darwin · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2008
This paper will review the changes that room acoustics can make to the cues available for speech perception and those available for the localisation of sound sources, and give an overview of the perceptual mechanisms underlying the causes of the reduced intelligibility that reverberant room acoustics can make to the intelligibility of speech that is masked by additional sources of speech. Major factors that contribute to the interference of one source of speech by another are the obscuring of primary speech cues either by masking or by the failure of simultaneous grouping mechanisms, and the failure to track the sounds of an individual talker across time. The role of spatial localisation mechanisms to both these factors will be discussed.