Modeling Sluggishness in Binaural Unmasking of Speech for Maskers With Time-Varying Interaural Phase Differences.
Christopher F Hauth, Thomas Brand
PMID 29338577WHAT IT FOUND
Normal-hearing listeners understood speech in noise best when the noise's left-right phase changed slowly, especially at 0.25 Hz.
Their advantage shrank as phase changes sped up and plateaued above 4 Hz.
Key findings
01The median speech reception threshold was −12.3 dB SNR at 0.25 Hz, compared with −9.2 dB SNR in the diotic condition.
02Speech reception thresholds increased, meaning worse intelligibility, as modulation frequency rose up to 4 Hz, and release from masking stayed between 1 dB and 1.5 dB above 4 Hz.
03A 200 ms binaural time constant showed best agreement with the perceptual data.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they found
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What it does not show
Only 10 normal-hearing young adults participated, so the result does not show how people with hearing loss would perform. The stimuli used synthetic interaural phase modulation and did not include realistic changes in location, level, and time together. The model was fitted and tested on the same experimental data, and the best time constant was selected by comparing model predictions. At 0.25 Hz, the randomly set initial phase made results more variable because the modulation period was 4 s and the sentence length was about 2 s. The study measured speech reception threshold in noise, not everyday communication, classroom performance, or hearing aid benefit.
Declared interests
No funding or conflict-of-interest statement is included in the article text. The listed publication types include Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't.
The easy way to misread this
Do not read this as evidence that a hearing aid setting, speech training, or noise modification will improve speech understanding in patients. The study measured 10 listeners with normal hearing in a laboratory task using synthetic phase modulation, and it did not test clinical outcomes.