Cite as:
Kim J, Sironic A, Davis C, 2011, "Hearing speech in noise: Seeing a loud talker is better" Perception 40(7) 853 – 862
Download citation data in RIS format

Hearing speech in noise: Seeing a loud talker is better

Jeesun Kim, Amanda Sironic, Chris Davis

Received 21 February 2011, in revised form 25 July 2011

Abstract. Seeing the talker improves the intelligibility of speech degraded by noise (a visual speech benefit). Given that talkers exaggerate spoken articulation in noise, this set of two experiments examined whether the visual speech benefit was greater for speech produced in noise than in quiet. We first examined the extent to which spoken articulation was exaggerated in noise by measuring the motion of face markers as four people uttered 10 sentences either in quiet or in babble-speech noise (these renditions were also filmed). The tracking results showed that articulated motion in speech produced in noise was greater than that produced in quiet and was more highly correlated with speech acoustics. Speech intelligibility was tested in a second experiment using a speech-perception-in-noise task under auditory-visual and auditory-only conditions. The results showed that the visual speech benefit was greater for speech recorded in noise than for speech recorded in quiet. Furthermore, the amount of articulatory movement was related to performance on the perception task, indicating that the enhanced gestures made when speaking in noise function to make speech more intelligible.

Restricted material:

 Full-text PDF size: 508 Kb

 References  27 references, 15 with DOI links ()

Your computer (IP address: 72.44.48.122) has not been recognised as being on a network authorised to view the full text or references of this article. If you are a member of a university library that has a subscription to the journal, please contact your serials librarian (subscriptions information).