Effect of Energy Equalization on the Intelligibility of Speech in Fluctuating Background Interference for Listeners With Hearing Impairment.
Laura A D'Aquila, Joseph G Desloge, Charlotte M Reed and 1 others
PMID 28602128WHAT IT FOUND
For listeners with hearing loss, a signal-processing method increased the benefit from regular fluctuating noise, but not from speech-like noise, and average consonant scores were lower than with unprocessed speech.
Key findings
01For listeners with hearing impairment, the normalized benefit of square-wave interrupted noise over continuous noise rose from 0.32 with unprocessed speech to 0.64 with EEQ1 and 0.62 with EEQ4.
02The same normalized benefit did not increase with EEQ in speech-derived vocoded noises, and comparisons found no significant differences among unprocessed, EEQ1, and EEQ4 for VOC-1 and VOC-2.
03Averaged across all noise types, mean consonant scores for listeners with hearing impairment were 65% correct with unprocessed speech, 63% with EEQ1, and 59% with EEQ4.
STILL TO COME
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What it does not show
Only nine listeners with hearing impairment and four listeners with normal hearing were tested, and their hearing losses and test speech-to-noise ratios varied. The outcome was consonant identification in laboratory noise. The unprocessed condition was always tested first in Experiment 1, which could have affected comparisons, although Experiment 2 used randomized order. The benefit appeared in non-speech-derived square-wave and amplitude-modulated noises, not in speech-derived noises. The processing was tested through headphones in a laboratory.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that energy equalization improves everyday speech understanding for people with hearing loss. The benefit was limited to non-speech-derived fluctuating noises, was not seen in speech-derived noises, and average consonant scores across all noises were lower with processing than with unprocessed speech.