This study investigated the effects of speech-rate slowing as a pre-processing technique under reverberant conditions. We conducted a perceptual test using speech-rate slowing with and without steady-state suppression (Aral et al., Proc. Autumn Meet Acoust Soc. Jpn., pp. 449f, 2001, and, Acoust Sci. Tech., Vol.23, pp. 229f, 2002.) under several reverberant conditions. We hypothesized that speech-rate slowing with steady-state suppression yields greater improvement in speech intelligibility than simple speech-rate slowing. Our results indicated that simple speech-rate slowing improved speech intelligibility significantly at reverberation time of 2.0 s (from 45.2 to 57.7) and speech-rate slowing after steady-state suppression significantly improved speech intelligibility at reverberation times of 2.0 s (from 45.2 to 70.2) and 2.8 s (from 43.5 to 56.0). Furthermore, speech-rate slowing with steady-state suppression was superior to simple speech-rate slowing for improving speech intelligibility at a reverberation time of 2.0 s (from 57.7 to 70.2).
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