The purpose of the present study was to construct a multitalker babble stimuli based on Korean speech as well as to compare the spectrum of the Korean babble stimuli with that of English babble noise. The development of this multitalker babble noise would also provide better insights into the evaluation of hearing assistive devices, the evaluation of central auditory processing disorder (CAPD), and auditory training for Korean hearing-impaired listeners. Sixteen young normal-hearing speakers (8 males and 8 females) whose first language is Korean participated. All the participants were told to speak the sentences used in standardized Korean speech audiometry, newspaper, and magazine with conversational level for about two minutes. Each sentence was normalized to have the same RMS energy before forming Korean babble noise. The long-term average speech spectra (LTASS) of all utterances were analyzed with computerized speech lab (CSL) that is one of the leading speech analysis systems for acoustic phonetics. Results have showed that there were no differences among Korean LTASS of sentences, newspaper, and magazine (p<0.05). As expected, we found significant differences in spectral features between male-spoken and female-spoken LTASS. The level difference of the Korean LTASS was approximately 37 dB between low and high frequencies, indicating larger intensity in Korean that in English. Differences of 16 dB were
also found in the LTASS of between Korean and English multitalker babble noise, suggesting the possible differences of acoustic properties between Korean and English speech.
KEY WORDS:Babble noise·Multi-talker·LTASS (long term average speech sound).