Speaker
Description
This study investigated the effects of Spatial Release from Masking (SRM) on speech intelligibility in normal-hearing native Turkish speakers using the Turkish Modified Rhyme Test (MRT). Thirty participants (15 females, 15 males; mean age: 23.0 years, SD = 2.3) completed the MRT under nine spatial conditions defined by the combination of target word azimuth angle (0°, -50°, +50°) and speech-shaped noise (SSN) azimuth angle (0°, -50°, +50°) at a fixed 0 dB signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Accuracy and reaction time of the participants were also recorded. A two-way repeated-measures ANOVA revealed a significant main effect of word angle (p = .016) but not SSN angle (p = .206). No significant effect of spatial separation between target and masker was observed. Among the five distinctive features, graveness yielded the lowest accuracy and sibilation the highest (p = .022), with no significant interaction between distinctive features and SSN angle. The data establish a normative baseline for Turkish MRT and draw attention to spatial configuration and distinctive features as variables that deserve consideration in multilingual speech intelligibility research.