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http://dx.doi.org/10.7776/ASK.2019.38.6.651

Influence of SNR difference on the Korean speech intelligibility in classrooms  

Park, Chan-Jae (충북대학교 건축공학과)
Jo, Sung-Min (PEAS 친환경 엔지니어링)
Haan, Chan-Hoon (충북대학교 건축공학과)
Publication Information
The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea / v.38, no.6, 2019 , pp. 651-660 More about this Journal
Abstract
The present study aims to find out the necessary speech sound level which can satisfy with the speech intelligibility in a noisy classroom environments. For this, auralized materials were made to undertake listening tests with 27 people. Speech intelligibility tests were carried out using both Consonant-Vowel-Consonant (CVC) and Phonetically Balanced Words (PBW) methods. Signal to noise ratio was changed by 5 dB for each test. As a result, it was found that speech intelligibilities are increasing with larger Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR). It was also found that there is a lot of difference of speech intelligibilities by SNR for syllables (CVC) with the Reverberation Time (RT) of 1.5 s. However, any significant difference was not found for words (PBW) in the case with RTs of below 0.8 s. Also, it was revealed through the 2-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) test that SNR is the only attentive factor which can affect the Korean speech intelligibilities for both PBW and CVC methods. Therefore, RTs below 0.8 s could be the acoustic criteria for classroom which can minimize the effects of noise. In the case with RTs larger than 0.8 s, much larger SNR is needed to give sufficient speech intelligibility.
Keywords
Classroom; Korean; Speech intelligibility; Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR); Reverberation time; 2-way analysis of variance (ANOVA);
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Times Cited By KSCI : 2  (Citation Analysis)
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