Acoustic-phonetic correlates of talker intelligibility for adults and children

This study investigated acoustic-phonetic correlates of intelligibility for adult and child talkers, and whether the relative intelligibility of different talkers was dependent on listener characteristics. In experiment 1, word intelligibility was measured for 45 talkers (18 women, 15 men, 6 boys, 6 girls) from a homogeneous accent group. The material consisted of 124 words familiar to 7-year-olds that adequately covered all frequent consonant confusions; stimuli were presented to 135 adult and child listeners in low-level background noise. Seven-to-eight-year-old listeners made significantly more errors than 12-year-olds or adults, but the relative intelligibility of individual talkers was highly consistent across groups. In experiment 2, listener ratings on a number of voice dimensions were obtained for the adults talkers identified in experiment 1 as having the highest and lowest intelligibility. Intelligibility was significantly correlated with subjective dimensions reflecting articulation, voice dynamics, and general quality. Finally, in experiment 3, measures of fundamental frequency, long-term average spectrum, word duration, consonant-vowel intensity ratio, and vowel space size were obtained for all talkers. Overall, word intelligibility was significantly correlated with the total energy in the 1- to 3-kHz region and word duration; these measures predicted 61% of the variability in intelligibility. The fact that the relative intelligibility of individual talkers was remarkably consistent across listener age groups suggests that the acoustic-phonetic characteristics of a talker's utterance are the primary factor in determining talker intelligibility. Although some acoustic-phonetic correlates of intelligibility were identified, variability in the profiles of the "best" talkers suggests that high intelligibility can be achieved through a combination of different acoustic-phonetic characteristics.