Effect of reducing temporal intensity modulations on sentence intelligibility.

Modulations in the temporal intensity envelope of 24 1/4-octave bands were reduced by proportionally raising the troughs and lowering the peaks relative to the mean intensity in each band. The effect on intelligibility of various degrees of modulation reduction was investigated by measuring the speech-reception threshold (SRT) in noise. For conditions of severe modulation reduction, the number of correctly received sentences in quiet was scored. The effect of this deterministic modulation reduction was compared to the effect of stochastic modulation reduction obtained with addition of noise. Results for 12 normal-hearing subjects show that in the case of deterministic modulation reduction, intelligibility is reduced to 50% when the modulation-transfer factor equals 0.10, whereas in the case of modulation reduction by addition of noise, this intelligibility is reached already at a modulation-transfer factor of 0.27. This confirms that the effect of additive noise on intelligibility cannot be understood completely as a result of only modulation reduction. As suggested by Drullman [J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 97, 585-592 (1995)] two other factors associated with the addition of noise have to be taken into account: (1) the introduction of nonrelevant modulations, and (2) the corruption of the fine structure.