Predicting the intelligibility of reverberant speech for cochlear implant listeners with a non-intrusive intelligibility measure

Reverberation is known to reduce the temporal envelope modulations present in the signal and affect the shape of the modulation spectrum. A non-intrusive intelligibility measure for reverberant speech is proposed motivated by the fact that the area of the modulation spectrum decreases with increasing reverberation. The proposed measure is based on the average modulation area computed across four acoustic frequency bands spanning the signal bandwidth. High correlations (r = 0.98) were observed with sentence intelligibility scores obtained by cochlear implant listeners. Proposed measure outperformed other measures including an intrusive speech-transmission index based measure.