The Callsign Acquisition Test (CAT) is a new speech recognition test developed by the U.S. Army to examine speech intelligibility in a military environment. This study compared speech intelligibility results of the Callsign Acquisition Test with another test used widely in industrial applications, the Modified Rhyme Test, using listening tests and objective speech metrics. A group of 24 listeners between the ages of 18 and 25 participated in the study. Six different types of recorded background noises radiating from an armored personnel carrier; helicopter; jet engine; mid-size car; subway train; and standard pink noise were used in the study. Test results demonstrated that the differences in the mean speech recognition scores obtained for CAT and MRT across all selected background noises were not statistically significant. However, the effect of noise and interactions between the noise and the test were statistically significant. A correlation of the measured scores with the spectral content of the background noise revealed somewhat higher scores for MRT compared with CAT under selected background noises that have most of the frequency content above 500 Hz. In contrast, slightly higher scores for CAT were noticed for selected noises having predominantly low frequency components below 250 Hz.
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