Effects of listening conditions on perceptual ratings of hypernasal speech

Abstract

Perceptual speech evaluation is commonly used in clinical settings and research purposes. Nevertheless, criticisms and questions regarding the use of perceptual evaluation exist. Variable reliability and variety of influencing factors, including listeners’ experience and listeners’ training are concerned by many researchers. Nevertheless, listening condition in perceptual speech evaluation have not been studied since 1984. Updated studies with justifiable experimental procedures and statistic approaches are called. This study investigates and compares the effects of different listening conditions, i.e. high quality headphone condition, regular commercial earphone, and free field speaker condition; on the perceptual rating of hypernasal speech. Outcome measures include the intra- and inter-rater reliability, and intra- and inter-rater agreement. The results showed that the three investigated listening conditions did not pose statistically significant differences in rating hypernasal speech. This study contributes to the construction of standard procedures and provides insights and directions for future studies in perceptual speech evaluation.