Calibration of speech perception to room reverberation

Past studies of sound perception often assumed that our auditory sensory processes are relatively static, rather than plastic. However, in everyday environments, we naturally and fluidly compensate for interfering effects of background noise and room reverberation. In order to investigate how listeners calibrate auditory perception to such acoustic interference, a listening experiment was performed to measure the effect of sudden changes of reverberation on the identification of consonants. Binaural room impulse responses (BRIRs) measured in real rooms were convolved with speech tokens to simulate natural interference caused by reverberant energy. In the experiment, listeners identified the consonant present in a vowel-consonant target. On most trials, the target was presented following a carrier phrase (in a control condition, there was no preceding carrier). In some cases, the target and carrier phrase were processed by the same BRIRs while in others the BRIRs processing target and carrier differed in their types of reverberation. Results suggest that presenting a carrier and target with matching BRIRs improves accuracy of target consonant identification compared to cases in which the reverberation of the preceding carrier does not match that of the target.