Kates James M, Lavandier Mathieu, Muralimanohar Ramesh Kumar, Lundberg Emily M H, Arehart Kathryn H
Deptartment of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences, University of Colorado, Boulder, Colorado, United States of America.
ENPTE, Ecole Centrale de Lyon, CNRS, LTDS, UMR5513, Vaulx-en-Velin, France.
PLoS One. 2025 Jan 15;20(1):e0317266. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0317266. eCollection 2025.
Binaural speech intelligibility in rooms is a complex process that is affected by many factors including room acoustics, hearing loss, and hearing aid (HA) signal processing. Intelligibility is evaluated in this paper for a simulated room combined with a simulated hearing aid. The test conditions comprise three spatial configurations of the speech and noise sources, simulated anechoic and concert hall acoustics, three amounts of multitalker babble interference, the hearing status of the listeners, and three degrees of simulated HA processing provided to compensate for the noise and/or hearing loss. The impact of these factors and their interactions is considered for normal-hearing (NH) and hearing-impaired (HI) listeners for sentence stimuli. Both listener groups showed a significant reduction in intelligibility as the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) decreased, and showed a reduction in intelligibility in reverberation when compared to anechoic listening. There was no significant improvement in intelligibility for the NH group for the noise suppression algorithm used here, and no significant improvement in intelligibility for the HI group for more advanced HA processing algorithms as opposed to linear amplification in either of the two acoustic spaces or at any of the three SNRs.
房间内的双耳语音可懂度是一个复杂的过程,受到许多因素的影响,包括房间声学、听力损失和助听器(HA)信号处理。本文针对一个模拟房间与一个模拟助听器相结合的情况评估了可懂度。测试条件包括语音和噪声源的三种空间配置、模拟的消声和音乐厅声学、三种多说话者嘈杂干扰量、听众的听力状况以及为补偿噪声和/或听力损失而提供的三种模拟HA处理程度。针对正常听力(NH)和听力受损(HI)的听众对句子刺激考虑了这些因素及其相互作用的影响。两个听众组都表现出随着信噪比(SNR)降低可懂度显著下降,并且与消声聆听相比,在混响环境中可懂度也有所降低。对于此处使用的噪声抑制算法,NH组的可懂度没有显著提高;对于HI组,与在两个声学空间中的任何一个或三个SNR水平下的线性放大相比更先进的HA处理算法也没有使可懂度显著提高