Normal-hearing listeners tolerate moderate reverberation far better than noise

Evidence

Perceptually, noise and reverberation can both decrease speech intelligibility (e.g., Nabelek 1993 ; Payton et al. 1994 ), and can be particularly troublesome for cochlear-implant listeners (e.g., Qin and Oxenham 2005 ). However, error patterns differ substantially between noisy and reverberant spaces (Nabelek 1993 ; Assmann and Summerfield 2004 ). Moreover, normal-hearing listeners have remarkably good speech understanding in moderately reverberant spaces (e.g., Poissant et al. 2006 ). — Dijk, Pim van, Physiology, Psychoacoustics and…, 5025

Categorization

• XREF: Perceptual tolerance for reverberation pairs with the neural finding that steady-F0 segregation survives moderate rooms but not noise — a two-level congruence.