Adaptation to Room Acoustics Using the Modified Rhyme Test.

The negative effect of reverberant sound energy on speech intelligibility is well documented. Recently, however, prior exposure to room acoustics has been shown to increase intelligibility for a number of listeners in simulated room environments. This room adaptation effect, a possible extension of dynamic echo suppression, has been shown to be specific to reverberant rooms and requires binaural input. Because this effect has been demonstrated only using the Coordinated Response Measure (CRM) corpus it is important to determine whether the increase in intelligibility scores reported previously was due to the specific nature of the CRM task. Here we demonstrate a comparable room-acoustic effect using the Modified Rhyme Test (MRT) corpus in multiple room environments. The results are consistent with the idea that the room adaptation effect may be a natural phenomenon of listening in reverberant environments.