Native and Non-native Speech Perception by Hearing-Impaired Listeners in Noise- and Speech Maskers

Abstract

This study evaluated how hearing-impaired listeners perceive native (Swedish) and nonnative (English) speech in the presence of noise- and speech maskers. Speech reception thresholds were measured for four different masker types for each target language. The maskers consisted of stationary and fluctuating noise and two-talker babble in Swedish and English. Twenty-three hearing-impaired native Swedish listeners participated, aged between 28 and 65 years. The participants also performed cognitive tests of working memory capacity in Swedish and English, nonverbal reasoning, and an English proficiency test. Results indicated that the speech maskers were more interfering than the noise maskers in both target languages. The larger need for phonetic and semantic cues in a nonnative language makes a stationary masker relatively more challenging than a fluctuating-noise masker. Better hearing acuity (pure tone average) was associated with better perception of the target speech in Swedish, and better English proficiency was associated with better speech perception in English. Larger working memory and better pure tone averages were related to the better perception of speech masked with fluctuating noise in the nonnative language. This suggests that both are relevant in highly taxing conditions. A large variance in performance between the listeners was observed, especially for speech perception in the nonnative language.

Hearing impairment, cognition and speech understanding: exploratory factor analyses of a comprehensive test battery for a group of hearing aid users, the n200 study

“…Raven test : The Raven test score on sets D and E of Raven was 64%, and it was 81% on set D. These results are very close to independent and recent data by Kilman et al ( 2015 ), where performance for a slightly younger adult hearing impaired sample was 83% for set D.…”

“…The 50% threshold was −1.43 ( SD = 1.85), which is comparable with an average of −1.9 ( SD = 2.2) in a study by Kilman et al ( 2015 ) on another sample of hearing impaired participants.…”

A model of listening engagement (MoLE)

“…Ignoring the positive experiences individuals seek when engaging in social, communication activities may leave variance in behavioral tests unexplained. Moreover, the materials typically used in speech comprehension studies -that is, simple sentences that have little meaningful context and are not very interesting (e.g., Nilsson et al, 1994;Kilman et al, 2015;Wöstmann et al, 2015;Wendt et al, 2016) -may not motivate listening attentively the way that personally relevant discourse and stories do. The MoLE predicts qualitative differences in neural network activity and how effort is experienced for intrinsically motivating discourses and stories compared to isolated sentences.…”

Subjective ratings of masker disturbance during the perception of native and non-native speech

“…In the present study, we therefore evaluated the perceived disturbance for NH and HI listeners perceiving Swedish and English target speech in different masker conditions, including stationary and fluctuating noise and two-talker babble in Swedish and English. The subjective ratings analyzed in the present study were collected in the context of a larger study ( Kilman et al, 2014 , 2015 ).…”