Increasing speech intelligibility in monaural hearing by adding noise at the other ear

Kang Wang,Peng Wang,Xiaojun Qiu

doi:10.1016/j.apacoust.2018.10.035

Kang Wang, Peng Wang + Show 1 more

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Ambient environment noise can affect speech intelligibility in phone communication. This paper investigates the feasibility of increasing speech intelligibility in monaural hearing by adding noise at the other ear. The testing materials were generated by mixing the speech from the English Coordinate Response Measure corpus with three types of environmental noise, where 4 signals to noise ratios in the speech ear and 14 noise levels in the contralateral ear were included. The experimental results show that a proper level of contralateral noise can improve the speech intelligibility when the signal to noise ratio in the speech ear is lower than a certain level, but a large contralateral noise level has the opposite effect. A preliminary explanation for the phenomena is attempted by using a binaural loudness model and some psychoacoustic and physiological facts.

Highlights

Ambient environment noise affects the quality of the phone communication where speech is often only presented to just one ear, resulting in poor SpeechIntelligibility (SI)
A speech intelligibility test has been conducted with 36 students to investigate the effects of contralateral noise on the speech intelligibility that was only presented to one ear under different signal to noise ratios
It is found that a suitable level of contralateral noise can improve the speech intelligibility while a contralateral noise level larger than a certain value decreases the speech intelligibility

Summary

Introduction

Ambient environment noise affects the quality of the phone communication where speech is often only presented to just one ear, resulting in poor SpeechIntelligibility (SI). SI is defined as the measure of the comprehensible quality of speech, which can be used to quantify the speech perception in monaural hearing with binaural noise [1]. This paper investigates the effects of contralateral noise on the speech intelligibility in monaural hearing under different. The perception of the tonal signal presented to one ear was investigated about 70 years ago. It was found that the tonal signal and noise presented to one ear led to the same masking threshold as these presented to both ears [3]. It was confirmed that a given level of the correlated noise in the contralateral ear produced a constant increment in detection independent of the SNR in the signal ear [4]. It was found that the additional noise to the empty ear could reduce the threshold for the tonal signal presented only to one ear mixed with noise [5,6,7]

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