title: Measuring the effects of reverberation and noise on sentence intelligibility for hearing-impaired listeners.
abstract: OBJECTIVE
  The Speech Transmission Index (STI; Houtgast, Steeneken, & Plomp, 1980; Steeneken & Houtgast, 1980) is commonly used to quantify the adverse effects of reverberation and stationary noise on speech intelligibility for normal-hearing listeners. Duquesnoy and Plomp (1980) showed that the STI can be applied for presbycusic listeners, relating speech reception thresholds (SRTs) in various reverberant conditions to a fixed, subject-dependent STI value. The current study aims at extending their results to a wider range of hearing-impaired listeners.
  
  
  METHODS
  A reverberant analogue of the SRT is presented--the speech reception reverberation threshold (SRRT)--which determines the amount of reverberation that a listener can sustain to understand 50% of the presented sentences. SRTs are performed and evaluated in terms of STI for 5 normal-hearing participants and 36 randomly selected hearing-impaired participants.
  
  
  RESULTS
  Results show that differences in STI between reverberant and noisy conditions are only small, equivalent to a change in speech-to-noise ratio < 1.3 dB.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  The STI appears to be a convenient, single number to quantify speech reception of hearing-impaired listeners in noise and/or reverberation, regardless of the nature of the hearing loss. In future research, the SRRT may be applied to further investigate the supposed importance of cognitive processing in reverberant listening conditions.
authors.affiliation: VU University Medical Center,Amsterdam, the Netherlands. elj.george@vumc.nl
authors.forename: Erwin L J
authors.initials: EL
authors.lastname: George
authors.forename: S Theo
authors.initials: ST
authors.lastname: Goverts
authors.forename: Joost M
authors.initials: JM
authors.lastname: Festen
authors.forename: Tammo
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Houtgast
mesh_terms: D000161:Acoustic Stimulation / Q000379:methods*; D000328:Adult; D001301:Audiometry, Pure-Tone; D001309:Auditory Threshold / Q000502:physiology*; D006309:Hearing / Q000502:physiology; D006801:Humans; D008875:Middle Aged; D009622:Noise; D011304:Presbycusis / Q000503:physiopathology*; D013065:Speech Intelligibility / Q000502:physiology*; D013067:Speech Perception / Q000502:physiology*