Abstract
Purpose A broad area of interest to our group is to understand the consequences of the "cue profile" (a measure of how well a listener can utilize audible temporal and/or spectral cues for listening scenarios in which a subset of cues is distorted. The study goal was to determine if listeners whose cue profile indicated that they primarily used temporal cues for recognition would respond differently to speech-envelope distortion than listeners who utilized both spectral and temporal cues. Method Twenty-five adults with sensorineural hearing loss participated in the study. The listener's cue profile was measured by analyzing identification patterns for a set of synthetic syllables in which envelope rise time and formant transitions were varied. A linear discriminant analysis quantified the relative contributions of spectral and temporal cues to identification patterns. Low-context sentences in noise were processed with time compression, wide-dynamic range compression, or a combination of time compression and wide-dynamic range compression to create a range of speech-envelope distortions. An acoustic metric, a modified version of the Spectral Correlation Index, was calculated to quantify envelope distortion. Results A binomial generalized linear mixed-effects model indicated that envelope distortion, the cue profile, the interaction between envelope distortion and the cue profile, and the pure-tone average were significant predictors of sentence recognition. Conclusions The listeners with good perception of spectro-temporal contrasts were more resilient to the detrimental effects of envelope compression than listeners who used temporal cues to a greater extent. The cue profile may provide information about individual listening that can direct choice of hearing aid parameters, especially those parameters that affect the speech envelope.
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have