Effects of User Controlled Speech Rate on Intelligibility in Noisy Environments

Talkers intentionally producing high-intelligibility speech for listeners in challenging situations often reduce their speech rate. This study affords listeners fine-grained control over the playback rate of a desired speech signal in varying levels of background noise and tests listener intelligibility with their preferred and unmodified rates of speech. We find clear listener preference for decreased rates of speech as background noise increased. However, we also found degraded performance on a speech-in-noise intelligibility test relative to unmodified speech in these same conditions.