Assessing the efficacy of hearing-aid amplification using a phoneme test

Consonant-vowel (CV) perception experiments provide valuable insights into how humans process speech. Here, two CV identification experiments were conducted in a group of hearing-impaired (HI) listeners, using 14 consonants followed by the vowel /ɑ/. The CVs were presented in quiet and with added sp...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 2017-03, Vol.141 (3), p.1739-1748
Main Authors: Scheidiger, Christoph, Allen, Jont B., Dau, Torsten
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Acoustic Stimulation - methods
Aged
Audiometry, Speech - methods
Electric Stimulation
Equipment Design
Hearing Aids
Hearing Loss, Sensorineural - diagnosis
Hearing Loss, Sensorineural - psychology
Hearing Loss, Sensorineural - rehabilitation
Humans
Noise - adverse effects
Perceptual Masking
Persons With Hearing Impairments - psychology
Persons With Hearing Impairments - rehabilitation
Phonetics
Predictive Value of Tests
Recognition (Psychology)
Signal Processing, Computer-Assisted
Speech Acoustics
Speech Intelligibility
Speech Perception
Voice Quality
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Summary:Consonant-vowel (CV) perception experiments provide valuable insights into how humans process speech. Here, two CV identification experiments were conducted in a group of hearing-impaired (HI) listeners, using 14 consonants followed by the vowel /ɑ/. The CVs were presented in quiet and with added speech-shaped noise at signal-to-noise ratios of 0, 6, and 12 dB. The HI listeners were provided with two different amplification schemes for the CVs. In the first experiment, a frequency-independent amplification (flat-gain) was provided and the CVs were presented at the most-comfortable loudness level. In the second experiment, a frequency-dependent prescriptive gain was provided. The CV identification results showed that, while the average recognition error score obtained with the frequency-dependent amplification was lower than that obtained with the flat-gain, the main confusions made by the listeners on a token basis remained the same in a majority of the cases. An entropy measure and an angular distance measure were proposed to assess the highly individual effects of the frequency-dependent gain on the consonant confusions in the HI listeners. The results suggest that the proposed measures, in combination with a well-controlled phoneme speech test, may be used to assess the impact of hearing-aid signal processing on speech intelligibility.
ISSN:0001-4966
1520-8524
DOI:10.1121/1.4976066