The Lombard Effect: a physiological reflex or a controlled intelligibility enhancement?

International audienceThe purpose of this study was to examine whether speech in noisy environments consists of global acoustic and articulatory modifications or if there are some changes specific to units within the utterance. Changes on a more local level could be interpreted as a controlled intelligibility enhancement of specific speech cues such as cues to word segmentation or prosodic phrasing. Audio and video signals were recorded for a female native speaker of French in three conditions: silence, 85dB white noise, and 85dB “cocktail party” noise. The corpus consisted of 33 short sentences with a subject-verb-object (SVO) structure. Labial parameters were extracted from the video data. A controlled intelligibility enhancement in noise was observed for some cues to word segmentation and utterance structure