Effects of length of carrier phrase on release from masking in multi-talker voice guidance

摘要

Multilingualization of voice guidance is necessary for international passenger facilities and world famous tourist sites. When the voice guidance is provided by public address systems, normally the same content is sequentially broadcasted in several languages. The authors are advancing a challenging project to shorten the required time by simultaneously broadcasting all of the guidances. In this paper, as a basic study, a listening test on word intelligibility of multi-talker voice guidance was performed to clarify effects of length of carrier phrase. The target stimulus consisted of two different Japanese words by two different talkers which were simultaneously reproduced. The task of the listener was to answer both of the two words. As a carrier phrase, other Japanese words spoken by the two talkers were sequentially reproduced prior to the target stimulus. The carrier phrase and the target stimulus were presented from a loudspeaker installed in front of the listener. The parameters of the test were length of the carrier phrase and combination of pitches of the two talkers' voices. As a result, the length of the carrier phrase tended to affect the word intelligibility scores. However, the slope of the score with respect to the length widely varied from positive to negative depending on the test parameters.