Assessing the intelligibility of vocoded speech using a remote testing framework

TL;DR

This paper introduces a remote testing framework for speech intelligibility that enables participants to complete sentence recognition tasks on personal computers, showing higher intelligibility scores than in-lab tests.

Contribution

It presents a novel remote testing framework for speech intelligibility assessment and compares its effectiveness with traditional in-lab experiments.

Findings

Remote testing yields higher speech intelligibility scores.

Participants using personal computers perform comparably to in-lab subjects.

The framework is effective for assessing vocoded speech in various environments.

Abstract

Over the past year, remote speech intelligibility testing has become a popular and necessary alternative to traditional in-person experiments due to the need for physical distancing during the COVID-19 pandemic. A remote framework was developed for conducting speech intelligibility tests with normal hearing listeners. In this study, subjects used their personal computers to complete sentence recognition tasks in anechoic and reverberant listening environments. The results obtained using this remote framework were compared with previously collected in-lab results, and showed higher levels of speech intelligibility among remote study participants than subjects who completed the test in the laboratory.