Assessing the intelligibility of vocoded speech using a remote testing framework
This addresses the need for remote testing in speech research due to physical distancing, but it is incremental as it adapts existing methods to a new context.
The study tackled the problem of conducting speech intelligibility tests remotely during the COVID-19 pandemic by developing a framework for sentence recognition tasks, and found that remote participants showed higher speech intelligibility levels compared to in-lab results.
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.