When instructed to speak clearly for people with hearing loss, a talker can effectively enhance the intelligibility of his/her speech by producing "clear" speech. We analyzed global acoustic properties of clear and conversational speech from two talkers and measured their speech intelligibility over a wide range of signal-to-noise ratios in acoustic and electric hearing. Consistent with previou...

A modulation-based index is proposed for predicting speech intelligibility by cochlear implant (CI) listeners. The input to the proposed index are speech envelopes extracted using the individual CI user's daily strategy, and as such, this approach incorporates information about the number of active electrodes, shape of the compression function and electrical dynamic range. High correlation (r =...

Background: Variability in speech performance is a major concern for children with cochlear implants (CIs). Spectral resolution is an important acoustic component in speech perception. Considerable variability and limitations of spectral resolution in children with CIs may lead to individual differences in speech performance. The aim of this study was to assess the correlation between auditory ...

introduction: in developing countries, chronic otitis media (com) and cholesteatoma are relatively prevalent.  within the field of otology, com surgery remains one of the most common surgical treatments. most recent studies evaluating the potential prognostic factors in com surgery have addressed graft success rate and types of middle ear and mastoid pathology. there has been much controversy a...

The availability of a compact disc with a female speaker for clinical use has raised the issue of the equivalence between the female speaker and the previous standard male speaker for assessing the speech reception threshold (SRT). This study evaluated the relationship of two- and three-frequency averages to the SRT for a male speaker on an audio tape and a female speaker on a compact disc in t...

Noise-vocoded speech is commonly used to simulate the sensation after cochlear implantation as it consists of spectrally degraded speech. High individual variability exists in learning to understand both noise-vocoded speech and speech perceived through a cochlear implant (CI). This variability is partly ascribed to differing cognitive abilities like working memory, verbal skills or attention. ...

Sensorineural loss is characterized by increased hearing threshold, reduction in the dynamic range of hearing and loudness recruitment, and increased temporal and spectral masking, resulting in degraded speech perception. Several techniques including spectral contrast enhancement, multi-band frequency compression, and dichotic binaural presentation have been investigated for reducing the advers...

In this paper we present recent results on the development of the SynFace lip synchronized talking head towards multilinguality, varying signal conditions and noise robustness in the Hearing at Home project. We then describe the large scale hearing impaired user studies carried out for three languages. The user tests focus on measuring the gain in Speech Reception Threshold in Noise when using ...

When performing binaural spatialisation, it is widely accepted that the choice of head related transfer functions (HRTFs), and in particular use individually measured ones, can have an impact on localisation accuracy, externalization, overall realism. Yet HRTF choices speech-in-noise performances cocktail party-like scenarios has not been investigated depth. This paper introduces a study where ...

The purpose of this investigation was to determine levels of speech intelligibility between two submarines using standard transmitting and receiving units while in operation. Transmission and reception of prerecorded and live voice word lists was made using an AN/WQC-2 sonar unit with directional and omnidirectional transducer arrays. The lists were recorded at the point of reception and played...