Influence of SNR on the speech perception of incomplete hearing people

Abstract

In the past, people received an education based on the school curriculum, which indicated that the school age was restricted to people of ages from 5 to 24. However, early and lifelong education has further become crucial in the modern age, which means that education is available from preschool to the elderly. However, the ability to listen clearly is immature in preschoolers and generally deteriorated among the elderly compared with conventional school-age populations. Therefore, certain age groups exhibit a declined ability to perceive speech as their auditory characteristics differ from school-age students, which in this paper are referred to as people with incomplete hearing. This paper conducted an early study to establish the learning background noise criteria for people with incomplete hearing. To identify the differences in environmental speech perception abilities, variations were made to the background noise, and speech intelligibility tests were performed. The targeted ages for the experiment were three groups of 20 people or more respectively, an average age of 9.6 years for children, an average age of 24.4 years for adults, and an average age of 67.7 years for elderly. The smaller the signal to noise ratio (SNR), the lower is the percentage of correct answers in the speech intelligibility test. In general, the groups with incomplete hearing had a lower percentage of correct answers in the speech intelligibility test than the normal hearing adult group. Thus, the proper SNR for an educational space for people with incomplete hearing was determined to be 20 dB for the Elderly group and 15 dB for the children group.