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An Automated System for Sound Localization Testing in Hearing-Impaired Listeners
Published on: March 13, 2026
Prior listening in rooms improves speech intelligibility
Eugene Brandewie1, Pavel Zahorik
1Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Heuser Hearing Institute, University of Louisville, Louisville, Kentucky 40292, USA.
The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America
|July 24, 2010
Summary
Prior exposure to reverberant room acoustics improves speech intelligibility. This adaptation enhances understanding by lowering masked speech reception thresholds, especially in binaural listening conditions.
Area of Science:
- Acoustic Perception
- Auditory Neuroscience
Background:
- Previous studies show echo suppression after single reflection exposure.
- Generalizability of echo suppression to complex room acoustics and speech intelligibility is unknown.
Purpose of the Study:
- Investigate if prior exposure to reverberant room acoustics improves speech intelligibility.
- Determine the extent of dynamic echo suppression in realistic listening environments.
Main Methods:
- Speech intelligibility measured using the Coordinate Response Measure (CRM) corpus.
- Virtual auditory space techniques simulated reverberant room environments.
- Prior listening exposure manipulated via carrier phrases before target speech.
Main Results:
- Prior room exposure lowered masked speech reception thresholds by 2.7 dB on average.
- This resulted in an average improvement of over 18 percentage points in speech intelligibility.
- The effect was absent in anechoic conditions and reduced in monaural listening.
Conclusions:
- Prior binaural exposure to reverberant rooms enhances speech intelligibility.
- Perceptual adaptation to room acoustics may explain this improvement.
- Findings highlight the brain's ability to adjust to complex auditory environments.
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