The effect of interpersonal familiarity on auditory distance perception of reverberant speech

Familiarity with sound sources is known to have a modulatory effect on auditory distance perception. However, the level of familiarity that can affect distance perception is not clearly understood. A subjective experiment that aims to assess the effect of interpersonal familiarity on auditory distance perception is reported in this article. The experiment involves a binaural listening task where different source distances between 0.5 and 16 meters were emulated by convolving dry speech signals with binaural room impulse responses measured in a skyway. The experimental paradigm involved stimuli that consisted of speech signals recorded from different-gender couples who have self-reported to have known each other for at least a year with daily interaction. Each subject judged the distances of a total of 15 different speech stimuli from their partner, the spectrally most similar stranger and the spectrally most dissimilar stranger, for six different emulated distances, respectively. The main finding is that a similar but unfamiliar speaker is localized to be further away than either a familiar speaker or an unfamiliar speaker.