Word Spotting in a Multichannel Virtual Auditory Display at Normal and Accelerated Rates of Speech

The demands of concurrent radio communications in Navy shipboard command centers contribute to the problem of operator information overload and impede personnel optimization goals for new platforms. Motivations for serializing this task and human performance research with virtual, multichannel, rate-accelerated speech in support of this idea are briefly reviewed, and the results of a recent listening study in which participants carried out a Navyrelevant word-spotting task in this context are reported.