Measuring the effects of reverberation and noise on sentence intelligibility for hearing-impaired listeners.
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.
George
Erwin L J
EL
VU University Medical Center,Amsterdam, the Netherlands. elj.george@vumc.nl
Goverts
S Theo
ST
Festen
Joost M
JM
Houtgast
Tammo
T
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*