Reverberation degrades native listener’s perception of Japanese monosyllables and special morae

In this study, we focused on the speech perception of monosyllables and special morae in Japanese and compared the results under a reverberant condition with those under a non-reverberant condition. From the results of the monosyllables, we confirmed that even native speakers confuse part of the stimuli with relatively long reverberation. Furthermore, for the continua of nonsense words with special morae, we conducted long vs short identification tests. As a result, we found that reverberation affects the listeners’ performance, especially when durational cues are used. Perceiving announcements through a public address system in a large room, such as large halls, subway stations, and airport terminals, is often difficult even for native listeners. For non-native listeners, it is even more difficult. One of the major applications of the present study is providing more intelligible speech signals through such a system in a large room for native and non-native listeners. Testing with a larger set of stimuli and listeners including non-native listeners will be part of our future work.