Improving consonant identification in noise and reverberation by steady-state suppression as a preprocessing approach

Noise (N), reverberation (R), and a combination of N and R (NR) differently degrade speech intelligibility. The current study aims to improve speech intelligibility in public spaces by processing speech signals through public address systems (a preprocessing approach). As a preprocessing approach, we proposed steady-state suppression, and it has improved consonant identification in R. The current study tests the effect of steady-state suppression in N, R, and NR at three signal to noise ratios and at reverberation time of 0.9 s. Results showed that steady-state suppression significantly improved consonant identification by 21 young people in NR and in R. Furthermore, steady-state suppression improved consonant identification more in NR than in R. The results indicate that steady-state suppression may be applicable to public spaces having N and R. The results also indicate that an integration of N and R improves the performance of a preprocessing approach in a certain range of N and R.