Does the Speech Cue Profile Affect Response to Amplitude Envelope Distortion?

Abstract

Purpose A broad area of interest to our group is to understand the consequences of the “cue profile” (a measure of how well a listener can utilize audible temporal and/or spectral cues for listening scenarios in which a subset of cues is distorted. The study goal was to determine if listeners whose cue profile indicated that they primarily used temporal cues for recognition would respond differently to speech-envelope distortion than listeners who utilized both spectral and temporal cues. Method Twenty-five adults with sensorineural hearing loss participated in the study. The listener's cue profile was measured by analyzing identification patterns for a set of synthetic syllables in which envelope rise time and formant transitions were varied. A linear discriminant analysis quantified the relative contributions of spectral and temporal cues to identification patterns. Low-context sentences in noise were processed with time compression, wide-dynamic range compression, or a combination of time compression and wide-dynamic range compression to create a range of speech-envelope distortions. An acoustic metric, a modified version of the Spectral Correlation Index, was calculated to quantify envelope distortion. Results A binomial generalized linear mixed-effects model indicated that envelope distortion, the cue profile, the interaction between envelope distortion and the cue profile, and the pure-tone average were significant predictors of sentence recognition. Conclusions The listeners with good perception of spectro-temporal contrasts were more resilient to the detrimental effects of envelope compression than listeners who used temporal cues to a greater extent. The cue profile may provide information about individual listening that can direct choice of hearing aid parameters, especially those parameters that affect the speech envelope.

The Effects of Signal to Noise Ratio, T 60, Wide-Dynamic Range Compression Speed, and Digital Noise Reduction in a Virtual Restaurant Setting

“…Under slow WDRC/DNR off and fast WDRC/DNR on conditions, the processing strategies work in tandem. The slow WDRC/DNR off condition is the least distorting of the four combinations and preserves the amplitude modulations that are important for speech recognition (Souza et al 2021). Best performance was achieved by this combination of processing even though there was no DNR, which might not be the most intuitive approach to clinical audiologists.…”

“…One male and one female talker from the IEEE corpus were selected as target talkers. The targets were chosen based on previous data with the same corpus (Souza et al 2021) as having similarly high intelligibility without problematic speech production (e.g., no rapid speech or unusual intonation). Masking talkers included 14 different female and 14 different male talkers.…”

“…Among the most common of these is wide-dynamic range compression (WDRC), a processing strategy that applies relatively greater gain to low-amplitude time-portions of the speech signal and relatively lower gain to high-amplitude time-portions of the speech signal. The benefits and limitations of WDRC have been researched in depth (Jenstad et al 1999; Jenstad & Souza 2005; Rosengard et al 2005; Souza et al 2006; Reinhart & Souza 2016; Reinhart et al 2016, 2017; Rhebergen et al 2017; Rallapalli et al 2021; Souza et al 2021). Generally, slow-acting WDRC maintains the amplitude envelope contrast, allowing listeners to use speech cues related to the envelope more consistently.…”

Model-based hearing-enhancement strategies for cochlear synaptopathy pathologies

“…Since temporal-envelope coding is degraded by CS, a prime candidate for acoustic intervention is thus to modify the speech envelope which is essential for robust speech intelligibility (SI) [23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31]. Acoustic modifications of the speech-envelope shape and periodicity can improve SI [18,[32][33][34][35][36][37], especially in connection with hearing through cochlear implants [38][39][40][41][42][43].…”

Model-based hearing-enhancement strategies for cochlear synaptopathy pathologies

“…Since temporal-envelope coding is degraded by CS, a prime candidate for acoustic intervention is thus to modify the speech envelope which is essential for robust speech intelligibility (SI) [19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27]. Acoustic modifications of the speech-envelope shape and periodicity can improve SI [17,[28][29][30][31][32], especially in connection with hearing through cochlear implants [33][34][35][36][37][38].…”