Factors That Influence Intelligibility in Multitalker Speech Displays

Although many researchers have commented on the potential of audio display technology to improve intelligibility in multitalker speech communication tasks, no consensus exists on how to design an “optimal” multitalker speech display. In this article, we review several experiments that have used a consistent procedure to evaluate the effect of four monaural parameters on overall intelligibility. We also present the results of a new experiment that has used the same procedure to examine the influence of 2 additional factors in binaural speech displays: (a) the apparent spatial locations of the talkers and (b) the listener’s a priori information about the listening task.