Moderate frequency compression for the moderately hearing impaired.
The intelligibility of frequency-compressed speech was measured for four normal and eight hearing-impaired subjects with sensory-neural high-frequency loss. Hearing levels were roughly 40 dB. Four conditions of frequency compression, 0%, 20%, 33%, and 55% were obtained using a Varispeech compressor. The test materials were PB-50 word lists recorded by one male and one female speaker. The effect of frequency compression was to reduce intelligibility in all cases except one, that of the female speaker at 20% frequency compression. For this case, the hearing-impaired listeners showed a small average improvement. Although the effect was small, it represents one of the few instances when an experimental evaluation of a frequency-compression system has yielded positive results with the hearing impaired.
D000328:Adult; D001307:Auditory Perception; D003638:Deafness / Q000534:rehabilitation*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D013060:Speech