Effect of room acoustics on speech perception by children with hearing loss

Abstract

To study speech perception of children with hearing loss in virtual acoustic environments (VAE), a pair of research hearing aids has been previously integrated in a real-time dynamic binaural reproduction system. The auralization included simulations of room acoustics using individualized head-related and hearing aid-related transfer functions (HRTF and HARTF). In this study, a release from masking paradigm by Cameron and Dillon (2007) was adopted in German to investigate speech intelligibility by children fitted with hearing aids under realistic classroom acoustics. When immersed in VAE, each child was asked to repeat sentences spoken by a target talker always located at 0° azimuth, while two distractor talkers were continuously telling unfamiliar Grimm stories. The speech reception threshold (SRT) at 50% intelligibility was measured adaptively by changing the target talker speech level. A total of eight conditions were tested with each child by changing spatial cues (target-distractor collocated versus ...