Intelligibility ratings of continuous discourse: Application to hearing aid selection

Abstract

Twelve normal-hearing subjects rated the intelligibility of 35-s, hearing-aid-processed continuous discourse (CD) passages. Three talkers (two male, one female), four hearing aids, and two signal-to-babble (S/B) ratios were used in a completely crossed design. Research questions concerned: (1) ability of listeners to rate intelligibility, (2) sensitivity of hearing aid rankings were based on intelligibility ratings for three CD passages per instrument, and (3) dependence of hearing aid rankings on (a) S/B ratio, and (b) talker characteristics. Results were: (1) listeners were able to rate intelligibility, (2) rankings based on intelligibility ratings of three CD passages per hearing aid were capable of identifying two superior instruments within a group of four hearing aids that were similar in frequency/gain function, (3) listening in a more difficult S/B ratio substantially decreased the sensitivity of the hearing aid rankings for the female talker but had only minor effects on the rankings for the male talkers, and (4) hearing aid intelligibility rankings were found to be different for different talkers. Applications to hearing aid selection are discussed.

The emergence of Cognitive Hearing Science

“…Considerable effort was spent on research to predict word recognition performance from pure-tone threshold measures (Pavlovic, 1987) and to predict performance on more complex materials such as sentences from performance on simpler materials such as words and phonemes (Boothroyd, 2008). Some researchers attempted to vary the degree of semantic context (Kalikow, Stevens & Elliott, 1977) or to use discourse level materials to test the performance of people with hearing loss (Cox & McDaniel, 1984;De Filippo & Scott, 1978); however, these developments took place in relative isolation from the developments taking place at the same time in Cognitive Psychology. Some research on deafness and the use of sign language raised interesting questions about modal-ity-specific and modality-general aspects of language and cognitive processing (Rönnberg, Ö hngren & Lyxell, 1987).…”

The intelligibility of words, sentences, and continuous discourse using the articulation index

“…The assertion that this method produces a valid estimate of the intelligibility of CD is supported by Studebaker et al (1982) and Cox and McDaniel (1984).…”

Robust adaptive microphone array processing for hearing aids: Realistic speech enhancement

“…The original source for these stimuli was the Auditec audiotape version of the CID W-1 spondee list. The "noise" stimuli consisted of multivoice babble recorded in a busy cafeteria and then edited to remove segments of very high or low intensity (Cox and McDaniel, 1984). Both the speech and the babble were digitized with 12-bit resolution at 10128 Hz and then processed by 3 and 7 microphone arrays with 8 taps per sensor.…”