Comparing the monaural effects of reverberation on speech intelligibility in noise for hearing-impaired and normal-hearing listeners

Abstract

Reverberation has several detrimental effects on speech intelligibility in noise. They have been extensively studied with normal-hearing listeners. These effects are often simultaneous, and it is hard to disentangle the corresponding difficulties experienced by hearing-impaired listeners in noisy reverberant rooms. In this study, two monaural effects of reverberation were investigated for normal-hearing and hearing-impaired listeners with linear amplification (NAL-RP) to compensate for audibility. One is the temporal smearing of the target speech, which makes it less intelligible. The other is the temporal smearing of the noise masker, which decreases the dip listening benefit associated with envelope modulations in the noise. These two effects were studied separately and in combination, by applying reverberation either on the target speech, on the noise masker or on both. The results were analyzed using Bayesian ANOVAs and t-tests. Overall, the detrimental influence of reverberation was found similar for the hearing-impaired and normal-hearing listeners, indicating that a linear amplification of the signals seemed sufficient to compensate for the potential differences experienced by normal-hearing and hearing-impaired listeners.