Department of Computer Science and Biomedical Informatics, University of Thessaly, Lamia, Greece.
Institute of Computer Science, Faculty of Science, Pavol Jozef Šafárik University, Košice, Slovakia.
Trends Hear. 2024 Jan-Dec;28:23312165241273399. doi: 10.1177/23312165241273399.
In everyday acoustic environments, reverberation alters the speech signal received at the ears. Normal-hearing listeners are robust to these distortions, quickly recalibrating to achieve accurate speech perception. Over the past two decades, multiple studies have investigated the various adaptation mechanisms that listeners use to mitigate the negative impacts of reverberation and improve speech intelligibility. Following the PRISMA guidelines, we performed a systematic review of these studies, with the aim to summarize existing research, identify open questions, and propose future directions. Two researchers independently assessed a total of 661 studies, ultimately including 23 in the review. Our results showed that adaptation to reverberant speech is robust across diverse environments, experimental setups, speech units, and tasks, in noise-masked or unmasked conditions. The time course of adaptation is rapid, sometimes occurring in less than 1 s, but this can vary depending on the reverberation and noise levels of the acoustic environment. Adaptation is stronger in moderately reverberant rooms and minimal in rooms with very intense reverberation. While the mechanisms underlying the recalibration are largely unknown, adaptation to the direct-to-reverberant ratio-related changes in amplitude modulation appears to be the predominant candidate. However, additional factors need to be explored to provide a unified theory for the effect and its applications.
在日常的声学环境中,混响会改变人耳接收到的语音信号。正常听力的人能够很好地适应这些失真,迅速重新调整以实现准确的语音感知。在过去的二十年中,多项研究调查了听众用来减轻混响负面影响和提高语音可懂度的各种适应机制。我们根据 PRISMA 指南对这些研究进行了系统回顾,旨在总结现有研究、确定未解决的问题并提出未来的方向。两位研究人员独立评估了总共 661 项研究,最终有 23 项被纳入综述。研究结果表明,在不同的环境、实验设置、语音单元和任务中,在噪声掩蔽或不掩蔽条件下,对混响语音的适应能力是稳健的。适应的时间进程很快,有时在不到 1 秒的时间内就会发生,但这可能会因声学环境的混响和噪声水平而有所不同。在中等混响的房间中适应能力更强,而在混响非常强烈的房间中适应能力则最小。虽然重新调整的机制在很大程度上尚不清楚,但适应幅度调制的直达-混响比相关变化似乎是主要的候选者。然而,需要探索其他因素,以提供该效果及其应用的统一理论。