Self assessment of speech intelligibility listening to binaural recordings

Our ability to focus on a talker in an environment with several talkers is improved by our binaural hearing. The ability to listen to one talker is improved if the talkers are spatially well separated. A common problem with binaural recordings is front-back confusion, which can make it more difficult to focus on the target talker among several talkers. In this study the ability to localize a talker is compared to the ability to follow a talker in situations with several talkers. In the first part the subjects were asked to localize a talker in the horizontal plane listening to binaural recordings. In the second part of the study the subjects were instructed to assess their ability to follow a target male voice in presence of a masker consisting of two voices (male and female).Target and maskers were presented through separate loudspeakers in various positions. The same listening test was also performed with binaural recordings of the test environment using different artificial heads and in-ear recordings of humans. In both parts the binaural recordings were presented to the subjects through loudspeakers using cross-talk cancellation. Correlation between localization performance and self assessed speech intelligibility was analyzed.Godkänd; 2009; 20091019 (arny)