Abstract
Acoustic beamforming has been shown to improve identification of target speech in noisy listening environments for individuals with sensorineural hearing loss. This study examined whether beamforming would provide a similar benefit for individuals with aphasia (acquired neurological language impairment). The benefit of beamforming was examined for persons with aphasia (PWA) and age- and hearing-matched controls in both a speech masking condition and a speech-shaped, speech-modulated noise masking condition. Performance was measured when natural spatial cues were provided, as well as when the target speech level was enhanced via a single-channel beamformer. Because typical psychoacoustic methods may present substantial experimental confounds for PWA, clinically guided modifications of experimental procedures were determined individually for each PWA participant. Results indicated that the beamformer provided a significant overall benefit to listeners. On an individual level, both PWA and controls who exhibited poorer performance on the speech masking condition with spatial cues benefited from the beamformer, while those who achieved better performance with spatial cues did not. All participants benefited from the beamformer in the noise masking condition. The findings suggest that a spatially tuned hearing aid may be beneficial for older listeners with relatively mild hearing loss who have difficulty taking advantage of spatial cues.
Highlights
It is common for individuals with aphasia—i.e., language impairment resulting from stroke or other neurological injury/ disease—to report difficulty understanding speech in noisy environments
Visual inspection of these results suggested that all participants exhibited substantially lower BEAM speech reception thresholds (SRTs) than KEMAR SRTs, indicating a benefit of the beamformer, in the noise masking condition
This study investigated the benefit of acoustic beamforming for improving speech recognition in persons with aphasia and age- and hearing-matched controls, under both high-informational masking and high-energetic masking conditions
Summary
It is common for individuals with aphasia—i.e., language impairment resulting from stroke or other neurological injury/ disease—to report difficulty understanding speech in noisy environments. While the majority of past research on receptive speech processing in persons with aphasia (PWA) has focused on auditory language comprehension in quiet settings, several recent studies have directly investigated the ability of persons with aphasia (PWA) to selectively attend to and understand speech in the presence of auditory maskers [e.g., Rankin et al (2014) and Villard and Kidd (2019)]. These studies have provided evidence that PWA—even, in some cases, PWA with milder aphasia types thought to be characterized primarily by expressive language deficits— require higher target-to-masker ratios (TMRs) than do agematched controls in order to successfully understand target a)Portions of this work were presented at the 177th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, Louisville, KY, May 2019, and are described in S.
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