Assessment of auralizations of monosyllabic words for hearing impaired students

Abstract

This paper discusses results of a research project, which seeks to develop Turkish speech recognition tests by auralizations for hearing impaired students based on monosyllabically structured words. In the context of this study, two sets of 25-items phonetically balanced monosyllabic Turkish words were recorded in the anechoic chamber of TUBITAK National Metrology Institute in Gebze, Turkey. Each monosyllabic word was recorded through a carrier sentence. After the vocal quality, accent and pronunciation in the recordings were approved by qualified audiologists, auralizations of the recorded sentences were developed in an acoustic simulation software (ODEON v12). Listening tests developed from auralizations in three classroom models with varying reverberation times and signal to noise ratios were presented to ten hearing impaired students. The preliminary results of these listening tests are presented and discussed in this study. This paper also aims to compare the results of listening tests with hearing impaired students with the listening tests made previously with normal hearing students.