High RT in rooms may have which effect?

• A. Reduced speech clarity
• B. No effect on speech
• C. Echoes and difficulty hearing speech
• D. Improved intelligibility

Answer: (C)

Reverberation time reflects how long sound energy lingers in a room after the source stops. When RT is high, reflections persist and overlap with new speech, creating echoes and a continuous wash of sound. That smearing makes consonants and short vowels harder to distinguish, so speech becomes less clear and harder to understand. This is why rooms with long reverberation times tend to reduce speech intelligibility; reducing RT improves clarity by allowing speech to decay quickly and be heard more distinctly.