The influence of talker differences on vowel identification by normal-hearing and hearing-impaired listeners

Vowel identification was tested in quiet, noise, and reverberation with 20 normal-hearing subjects and 20 hearing-impaired subjects. Stimuli were 15 English vowels spoken in a /b-t/context by six male talkers. Each talker produced five tokens of each vowel. In quiet, all stimuli were identified by two judges as the intended targets. The stimuli were degraded by reverberation or speech-spectrum noise. Vowel identification scores depended upon talker, listening condition, and subject type. The relationship between identification errors and spectral details of the vowels is discussed.