An examination of speech reception thresholds measured in a simulated reverberant cafeteria environment

Abstract

Objective There is increasing demand in the hearing research community for the creation of laboratory environments that better simulate challenging real-world listening environments. The hope is that the use of such environments for testing will lead to more meaningful assessments of listening ability, and better predictions about the performance of hearing devices. Here we present one approach for simulating a complex acoustic environment in the laboratory, and investigate the effect of transplanting a speech test into such an environment. Design Speech reception thresholds were measured in a simulated reverberant cafeteria, and in a more typical anechoic laboratory environment containing background speech babble. Study Sample The participants were 46 listeners varying in age and hearing levels, including 25 hearing-aid wearers who were tested with and without their hearing aids. Results Reliable SRTs were obtained in the complex environment, but led to different estimates of performance and hearing aid benefit from those measured in the standard environment. Conclusions The findings provide a starting point for future efforts to increase the real-world relevance of laboratory-based speech tests.

Development and preliminary evaluation of a new test of ongoing speech comprehension

“…For example, here we only examined speech comprehension in a relatively simple babble background. Future work will move this test into more realistic and challenging background environments containing reverberation and competing speech, such as one would encounter when conversing in a noisy restaurant (Best et al, 2015). In such a situation, distraction from nearby talkers could interfere more strongly with comprehension than with sentence recall, leading to a larger difference in performance between the two tests.…”

“…The treatment of participants was approved by the Australian Hearing Ethics Committee and conformed in all respects to the Australian government’s National Statement on Ethical Conduct in Human Research. Note that these listeners also participated in another study described in a companion paper (Best et al, 2015). The 37 listeners that participated here are a subset of the 47 that participated in the other study, and some of the data presented here (for the sentence test) also appear in that paper (as the ‘standard’ environment).…”

Theoretical Issues of Validity in the Measurement of Aided Speech Reception Threshold in Noise for Comparing Nonlinear Hearing Aid Systems

“…To achieve ecologically relevant SRTn, it seems likely that simple and static acoustical scenarios have to be abandoned in favor of those which are complex and dynamic. The study of Best et al (2015) provides an example of such an approach, where the addition of room reverberation and multiple spatially realistic natural background conversations moved SRTn in a positive direction, especially for hearing-impaired listeners.…”

“…Developers of outcome measures are always striving to create test conditions that better represent salient aspects of real-life situations while maintaining control of as many confounding variables as possible. Steady progress is being made as new test conditions are developed including various forms of realistic complexity (Yost et al, 1996;Brungart and Simpson, 2007;Boymans et al, 2008;Jensen et al, 2012;Best et al, 2015). One of the primary motivating factors behind such efforts is the recognition that simple test scenarios generally result in SRTns too low to be of certain ecological validity.…”

Validation of a Virtual Sound Environment System for Testing Hearing Aids

“…A study with a technically comparable auralization system at the HA manufacturer Oticon [16] compared speech intelligibility and listening effort of hearing-impaired listeners in different virtual rooms, a 'dry' room, a lecture hall, and a very reverberant basement. Another study, using a similar system, tested speech intelligibility in a 'complex' cafeteria environment with multiple talkers, and in a 'standard' anechoic environment [17]. Finally, two very recent simulation studies investigated the applicability of multichannel loudspeaker-based reproduction chains for testing HAs [18,19].…”