Speech Intelligibility in Reverberation is Reduced During Self-Rotation

A unique study on speech intelligibility examined how participants' self-rotation affected their ability to understand speech in a spatialized speech test. The study found that people tended to undershoot the target location but still oriented themselves acoustically optimally. The introduction of visual cues (an avatar) improved speech intelligibility, especially for lateral targets. However, self-rotation reduced intelligibility for lateral targets compared to when participants were standing still without visual cues. The findings emphasize the role of visual cues in achieving optimal self-rotations and improving speech intelligibility.