• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.31 no.3
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• pp.129-141
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• 2012

The present study aims to investigates the effects of the physical sound clarity (D50, STI) on the subjective speech intelligibility of the both Korean and Chinese languages which can be caused by increase of the sound absorption in classroom. In order to this, sound measurements were undertaken at a classroom with and without absorption materials. Also, speech intelligibility tests were conducted by Korean and Chinese students using their native languages. As the results, it was found that both sound clarity and speech intelligibility were improved with increasing sound absorption. Also, it was revealed that Chinese speech intelligibility was more improved than Korean with same impose of sound absorption. It was considered by the difference of phonetic characteristics of two languages. Analysing correlation of physical sound clarity and subjective speech intelligibility, it was shown that D50 is highly correlated with Korean (0.696) and Chinese (0.707) respectively. Also, STI was highly correlated with Korean (0.651) and Chinese (0.665). Thus, it can be concluded that D50 and STI have significant correlations with the speech intelligibility.