Effects of Slow- and Fast-Acting Compression on Hearing-Impaired Listeners’ Consonant–Vowel Identification in Interrupted Noise

Kowalewski, Borys; Zaar, Johannes; Fereczkowski, Michal; MacDonald, Ewen; Strelcyk, Olaf; May, Tim; Dau, Torsten

doi:10.1177/2331216518800870

Cited by 18 publications

(16 citation statements)

References 44 publications

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“…In HAS-II, the use of fast-acting compression and noise reduction might compromise sound quality, but, nonetheless, this solution is expected to provide the most benefit for listeners that belong to Profile B. This is in agreement with the findings of [ 11 ], where fast-acting compression provided a systematic audibility benefit. Profile C corresponds to audiometric thresholds >30 dB HL at low frequencies and >50 dB HL at high frequencies, and with SI, LP, spectro-temporal resolution, and binaural-processing deficits.…”

Section: Auditory Profile-based Fitting Rationalesupporting

confidence: 84%

Towards Auditory Profile-Based Hearing-Aid Fitting: Fitting Rationale and Pilot Evaluation

et al. 2021

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Background—The clinical characterization of hearing deficits for hearing-aid fitting purposes is typically based on the pure-tone audiogram only. In a previous study, a group of hearing-impaired listeners completed a comprehensive test battery that was designed to tap into different dimensions of hearing abilities. A data-driven analysis of the data yielded four clinically relevant patient sub-populations or “auditory profiles”. The purpose of the current study was to propose and pilot-test profile-based hearing-aid settings in order to explore their potential for providing more targeted hearing-aid treatment. Methods—Four candidate hearing-aid settings were developed and evaluated by a subset of the participants tested previously. The evaluation consisted of multi-comparison preference ratings that were carried out in realistic sound scenarios. Results—Listeners belonging to the different auditory profiles showed different patterns of preference for the tested hearing-aid settings that were largely consistent with the expectations. Conclusions—The results of this pilot evaluation support further investigations into stratified, profile-based hearing-aid fitting with wearable hearing aids.

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Section: Auditory Profile-based Fitting Rationalesupporting

confidence: 84%

Towards Auditory Profile-Based Hearing-Aid Fitting: Fitting Rationale and Pilot Evaluation

et al. 2021

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“…The gain is increased during the dips in the noise, amplifying the low-level glimpses of speech present in those dips. The results of Desloge et al (2017) and Kowalewski et al (2018) further support the notion that fast-acting compression systems provide improved short-term audibility and increased opportunities for glimpsing, as long as the noise exhibits prominent fluctuations and the long-term input SNR is negative.…”

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confidence: 53%

Perceptual Evaluation of Signal-to-Noise-Ratio-Aware Dynamic Range Compression in Hearing Aids

2020

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Dynamic range compression is a compensation strategy commonly used in modern hearing aids. Fast-acting systems respond relatively quickly to the fluctuations in the input level. This allows for more effective compression of the dynamic range of speech and hence enhanced the audibility of its low-intensity components. However, such processing also amplifies the background noise, distorts the modulation spectra of both the speech and the background, and can reduce the output signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Recently, May et al. proposed a novel SNR-aware compression strategy, in which the compression speed is adapted depending on whether speech is present or absent. Fast-acting compression is applied to speech-dominated time–frequency (T-F) units, while noise-dominated T-F units are processed using slow-acting compression. It has been shown that this strategy provides a similar effective compression of the speech dynamic range as conventional fast-acting compression, while introducing fewer distortions of the modulation spectrum of the background and providing an improved output SNR. In this study, this SNR-aware compression strategy was compared with conventional fast- and slow-acting compression in terms of speech intelligibility and subjective preference in a group of 17 hearing-impaired listeners with varying degree of hearing loss. The results show a speech intelligibility benefit of the SNR-aware compression strategy over the conventional slow-acting system. Furthermore, the SNR-aware approach demonstrates an increased subjective preference compared with both conventional fast- and slow-acting systems.

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“…This could be relevant for hearing aid design. For instance, there is no consensus on whether hearing aid release times should be a few or several hundreds of milliseconds (e.g., Jenstad and Souza, 2005;Kowalewski et al, 2018). In fluctuating noise, adaptation would be expected to occur for fast but not for slow release times because the hearing aid would work like a linear amplifier and would not reduce the level fluctuations in the noise in the latter case.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Adaptation to Noise in Human Speech Recognition Depends on Noise-Level Statistics and Fast Dynamic-Range Compression

et al. 2020

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Human hearing adapts to background noise, as evidenced by the fact that listeners recognize more isolated words when words are presented later rather than earlier in noise. This adaptation likely occurs because the leading noise shifts ("adapts") the dynamic range of auditory neurons, which can improve the neural encoding of speech spectral and temporal cues. Because neural dynamic range adaptation depends on stimulus-level statistics, here we investigated the importance of "statistical" adaptation for improving speech recognition in noisy backgrounds. We compared the recognition of noised-masked words in the presence and in the absence of adapting noise precursors whose level was either constant or was changing every 50 ms according to different statistical distributions. Adaptation was measured for 28 listeners (9 men) and was quantified as the recognition improvement in the precursor relative to the no-precursor condition. Adaptation was largest for constantlevel precursors and did not occur for highly fluctuating precursors, even when the two types of precursors had the same mean level and both activated the medial olivocochlear reflex. Instantaneous amplitude compression of the highly fluctuating precursor produced as much adaptation as the constant-level precursor did without compression. Together, results suggest that noise adaptation in speech recognition is probably mediated by neural dynamic range adaptation to the most frequent sound level. Further, they suggest that auditory peripheral compression per se, rather than the medial olivocochlear reflex, could facilitate noise adaptation by reducing the level fluctuations in the noise.

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Effects of Slow- and Fast-Acting Compression on Hearing-Impaired Listeners’ Consonant–Vowel Identification in Interrupted Noise

Cited by 18 publications

References 44 publications

Towards Auditory Profile-Based Hearing-Aid Fitting: Fitting Rationale and Pilot Evaluation

Towards Auditory Profile-Based Hearing-Aid Fitting: Fitting Rationale and Pilot Evaluation

Perceptual Evaluation of Signal-to-Noise-Ratio-Aware Dynamic Range Compression in Hearing Aids

Adaptation to Noise in Human Speech Recognition Depends on Noise-Level Statistics and Fast Dynamic-Range Compression

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