Many elderly persons with high-frequency hearing loss find telephone use frustrating due to lower intensity levels and reductions in acoustical information that can be useful in deciphering speech. The purpose of this project is to pre-process the speech signal before it is sent over the phone line and provide speech enhancement without the use of amplifying handsets or hearing aids at the receiving end. The enhancement technique takes into account the limited bandwidth of the phone line as well as the hearing characteristics of the user. Two pre-processing schemes, a single channel and a double channel approach, used to increase the intelligibility of speech in these situations are discussed. The single channel method performs amplitude compression of the entire signal. The two-channel method filters the incoming signal into high-frequency and low-frequency channels and performs independent compression on each before recombination. Results comparing the two speech enhancement schemes against no processing for a group of elderly hearing-impaired subjects are presented. [Work supported by a grant from the Franklin County Office on Aging.]
Elderly listeners with sensorineural hearing loss have difficulty understanding speech over the telephone. Hearing aids and telephone amplifiers help, but many elderly individuals do not have the access to these devices. One possible solution to the problem is to ‘‘preprocess’’ the speech at the talker before transmitting it to the hearing-impaired listener. The purpose of this research is to compare processing techniques applied at the talker end that can significantly improve the speech understanding of these persons. Intelligibility enhancement of single- and two-channel amplitude compression schemes are compared by objective and subjective means. The articulation index (AI) and the diagnostic rhyme test (DRT) are used as the objective and subjective measures, respectively. In a preliminary study, we used normal listeners with speech that is passed through Moore’s [(1999)] hearing loss model. The hearing loss model simulates the effects of loudness recruitment and reduced frequency selectivity as well as elevated thresholds of hearing. In addition, elderly hearing-impaired subjects were tested for a subset of the processing schemes. We present results comparing relative intelligibility of the various processing schemes. [Work supported by a grant from the Ohio State University College of Social and Behavioral Sciences.]
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