Effect of voice problems on vowel identifications in different acoustics environments

Voice disorders can reduce speech intelligibility. This study evaluated the effect of noise, voice disorders, and room acoustics on vowel intelligibility. College students listened to 9 vowels in /h/-V-/d/ format. The speech was recorded by three adult females with dysphonia and three adult females with normal voice quality. The recordings were convolved with three oral-binaural impulse responses with 0.4 s, 0.7 s, and 3.1 s of reverberation time. The test was performed online. The intelligibility and the listening easiness were significantly higher when the speakers had normal voice quality and in low reverberated environments.