Speech Intelligibility in Reverberation is Reduced During Self-Rotation

Speech intelligibility in cocktail party situations has been traditionally studied for stationary sound sources and stationary participants. Here, speech intelligibility and behavior were investigated during active self-rotation of standing participants in a spatialized speech test. We investigated if people would rotate to improve speech intelligibility, and we asked if knowing the target location would be further beneficial. Target sentences randomly appeared at one of four possible locations: 0°, ± 90°, 180° relative to the participant's initial orientation on each trial, while speech-shaped noise was presented from the front (0°). Participants responded naturally with self-rotating motion. Target sentences were presented either without (Audio-only) or with a picture of an avatar (Audio–Visual). In a baseline (Static) condition, people were standing still without visual location cues. Participants’ self-orientation undershot the target location and orientations were close to acoustically optimal. Participants oriented more often in an acoustically optimal way, and speech intelligibility was higher in the Audio–Visual than in the Audio-only condition for the lateral targets. The intelligibility of the individual words in Audio–Visual and Audio-only increased during self-rotation towards the rear target, but it was reduced for the lateral targets when compared to Static, which could be mostly, but not fully, attributed to changes in spatial unmasking. Speech intelligibility prediction based on a model of static spatial unmasking considering self-rotations overestimated the participant performance by 1.4 dB. The results suggest that speech intelligibility is reduced during self-rotation, and that visual cues of location help to achieve more optimal self-rotations and better speech intelligibility.