Acoustics and speech intelligibility in multilingual spaces

The cultural and social diversity of modern urban environments, can affect oral communication within spaces where multiple languages are used. Most of the studies on speech intelligibility focus on improving the room acoustic parameters; however, in such multilingual environments, the intelligibility of speech is influenced not only by room acoustic parameters, but also by languages’ characteristics and socio-cultural factors related to the individuals using those languages. The aim of the present study is to examine a combination of physical, linguistic and socio-cultural factors affect communication of multilingual environments. More specifically, the study investigates the relationship between speech intelligibility parameters measured from physical tests and listening tests in four languages (English, Polish, Chinese and Arabic). Speech intelligibility comparisons focus on results obtained from the speech transmission index (STI), word lists based upon the diagnostic rhyme test (DRT), and phonemically balanced sentence lists. In its second stage, the research will look at how socio-cultural factors affect speech intelligibility and communication.