Jan 2026· Trends in Hearing· Vol 30· 0 citations· 57 references
Medicine
TL;DR
It is demonstrated that speech intelligibility measurements incorporating fluctuating maskers provide potentially relevant information beyond standard assessments and can support a more individualized assessment of hearing loss.
Abstract
Measures of speech intelligibility in noise show limited correspondence with difficulties people with hearing loss report from daily life. This mismatch suggests that standard measurement conditions do not sufficiently capture aspects that are relevant for speech perception, such as dip listening and spatial release from masking. In the present study we developed and evaluated a test condition that incorporates these aspects and compared it with a standard condition. Speech intelligibility was measured in 100 participants with normal hearing (NH, N=17) and hearing loss (HL, N=83) ranging from mild to severe. Measurements were conducted using the German matrix sentence test (OLSA) in the standard condition with frontal presentation of stationary noise co-located with the target speech, and the proposed condition with fluctuating, speech-like maskers spatially separated (±60°) from the target. Stimuli were presented via headphones using virtual acoustics. Tests were performed unaided and with individualized amplification. The proposed condition revealed reduced speech intelligibility also for listeners with HL that showed close-to-normal speech intelligibility in the standard condition. With individualized amplification, more listeners with HL showed reduced speech intelligibility compared to NH listeners than in the standard condition. Benefit of amplification varied widely across individuals with similar hearing thresholds, with some listeners showing little or no benefit. The advantages of the proposed condition were driven by masker fluctuations rather than by spatial separation of sound sources. These findings demonstrate that speech intelligibility measurements incorporating fluctuating maskers provide potentially relevant information beyond standard assessments and can support a more individualized assessment of hearing loss.
Adaptation, or rapid performance gains with repeated exposure, is one of the processes that supports the recognition of speech in challenging listening conditions. Age-related hearing loss is associated with substantial declines in speech recognition in challenging conditions. It is not clear whether age-related hearing loss relates to adaptation and whether adaptation is influenced by a hearing-aid. To this end, we characterized adaptation to time-compressed speech and speech in babble noise in a group of 57 participants (ages 60–90) that were tested both with and without hearing aids fitted by an audiologist just before the assessment. Significant adaptation occurred in both speech conditions. Speech in noise recognition accuracy improved by approximately 15% over the course of listening to 16 sentences with hearing aids but remained stable without the hearing aids (OR = 1.24). The rate of adaptation did not depend on hearing. Adaptation to time-compressed speech also occurred only with the hearing aids (improvement of ∼10%, OR = 1.32). Adaptation was stronger in listeners with poorer hearing (OR = 1.18), perhaps due to their poor starting accuracy. Together, these data suggest that amplification can contribute to speech adaptation even in inexperienced hearing aid users.
K. Banai, L. Lavie· Journal of the Acoustical So...· 0 citations
Difficulties understanding speech in noise remain a common complaint even among listeners with normal hearing sensitivity, highlighting the need for objective, more effective measures of real-world listening. The goal of this study was to validate the use of a novel, chirped-speech (Cheech) stimulus—continuous, naturally-spoken speech fused with chirps designed to elicit robust auditory evoked potentials—to characterize relationships between speech recognition, listening effort, and auditory neural encoding. Twenty-five normal-hearing adults completed a sentence-recognition task using both original (unmodified) and Cheech-modified AzBio sentence lists in quiet, +3 dB, and −3 dB signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) conditions while neural responses from the brainstem through cortex were recorded simultaneously. Speech recognition remained near ceiling in quiet but declined with decreasing SNR for both original and Cheech stimuli. Compared with clean speech, Cheech-modified speech showed slightly poorer recognition performance as SNR decreased and somewhat higher perceived effort overall. Yet, Cheech was highly effective at evoking auditory responses from the brainstem (auditory brainstem response, ABR) through the cortex (including middle- and late-latency responses, MLR and LLR) even with <5 minutes listening time per condition. Neural responses showed reduced amplitudes and prolonged latencies as SNR decreased. In general, ABR latencies and wave I amplitudes were associated with speech-in-noise recognition performance, whereas cortical responses (MLR Na, Nb, and LLR P1) were associated with subjective workload. These findings show that Cheech-modified speech preserves intelligibility while yielding robust, multilevel neural recordings during sentence perception, offering a promising approach to examine hierarchical auditory processing under ecologically relevant speech-in-noise conditions.
May Chao, C. Holloway, Lee M. Miller et al.· bioRxiv· 0 citations
Listeners with hearing loss report difficulty understanding speech in the presence of background talkers (the “cocktail party problem”) even while wearing hearing aids. In this listening situation, a listener must be able to focus on the target talker using cues related to the talker’s voice and spatial location. Hearing aids provide necessary amplification for listeners with hearing loss, but they can also disrupt sound localization, which may counteract the positive effects and impact speech recognition in spatialized speech mixtures. To investigate this possibility, we conducted a study in which normally hearing listeners performed two tasks with and without hearing aids. In one task, listeners localized individual words presented from loudspeakers. In another task, a five-talker mixture was presented and listeners identified words spoken by a target talker at a specified location. We observed striking individual variations in the degree of disruption in localization accuracy with hearing aids, which were associated with reductions in word identification accuracy. The results highlight that there are listener-specific effects of hearing aids on spatial perception that may impact speech understanding in cocktail party environments, although additional work is needed to evaluate these effects in listeners with hearing loss. [Work supported by NIH NIDCD R01DC015760.]
Elin Roverud, Virginia Best· Journal of the Acoustical So...· 0 citations
—The goal of this research is to look into the combined effect of an adaptive Wiener filter, frequency splitting, and amplitude compression on speech intelligibility for hearing impaired people in adverse listening environments. The adaptive Wiener filter is based on the adaptation of the filter frequency response from sample to sample depending on the voice signal statistics (mean and variance).The filter bank approach was modified to perform spectral splitting of the voice signal in order to lessen the influence of spectral masking. To address the issue of hearing loss, amplitude compression with a compression factor of 0.6 was used. As a result, the combined strategy aids in enhancing speech intelligibility for hearing-impaired individuals in noisy environments. To measure the intelligibility of processed speech, hearing-impaired subjects (moderate SNHL) were given the modified rhyming Test (MRT). The test procedure consists of 300 phrases. Each phrase is composed of consonant-vowel-consonant words (CVC). When compared to an adaptive Wiener filter, the results suggest that processing with a composite scheme improved speech intelligibility. With a lower SNR value of -6 dB, a maximum improvement in speech recognition score of 32.935 % was recorded.
Rajani S. Pujar· International Journal of Fut...· 0 citations
Elderly listeners with normal hearing to moderate hearing loss could maintain relatively high intelligibility for mosaic words segmented in blocks of 20 or 40 ms, provided the words had a high familiarity level.
Gerard B. Remijn, Yuna Uzuhashi, Emi Hasuo et al.· Audiology Research· 0 citations
Despite technical innovations in amplification and signal processing, hearing aid users still frequently report difficulty understanding speech in noise. Recent advances in hearing aid technology using deep neural networks (DNNs) promise to expand benefits of amplification beyond traditional noise reduction features. The present study evaluated the efficacy of a commercially available DNN-enabled hearing aid in a free-field speech understanding task using the coordinate response measure corpus with noise background. We compared multiple configurations of the DNN-enabled device (DNN-on versus DNN-off) as well as comparison devices with traditional noise reduction technologies. Results showed a significant benefit of the DNN-based noise reduction represented by higher CRM accuracy at all target locations, with the highest behavioral performance improvement observed at lateral target locations (±120 deg) for the DNN-enabled device compared to the same device with the DNN-off or the comparison devices. Furthermore, individual behavioral and cognitive measures were shown in some cases to have direct associations with this benefit. The results reported here demonstrate the benefits of unique noise reduction features to improve listener performance across multiple objective measures, and listener variability may in part be explained by suprathreshold and cognitive abilities.
Erol J. Ozmeral, Carrie A. Secor, Nathan C. Higgins· Journal of the Acoustical So...· 0 citations
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