In many speech communication applications, such as public address systems, speech is degraded by additive noise, leading to reduced speech intelligibility. In this paper a pre-processing algorithm is proposed that is capable of increasing speech intelligibility under an equal-power constraint. The proposed AdaptDRC algorithm comprises two time- and frequency-dependent stages, i.e., an amplifica...

OBJECTIVES This study had two purposes. The first was to assess the prevalence of cochlear dead regions (DRs) among listeners with moderate to severe hearing loss that is typical of a large proportion of adult hearing aid wearers. The second was to determine whether subjects who tested positive for DRs differed from those without DRs in their ability to utilize high-frequency speech cues in a l...

Objective: Acceptable Noise Level (ANL) has been established as a method to quantify the acceptance of background noise while listening to speech presented at the most comfortable level. The aim of the present study was to generate Danish, Swedish, and a non-semantic version of the ANL test and investigate normal-hearing Danish and Swedish subjects’ performance on these tests. Design: ANL was m...

OBJECTIVE Acceptable noise level (ANL) has been established as a method to quantify the acceptance of background noise while listening to speech presented at the most comfortable level. The aim of the present study was to generate Danish, Swedish, and a non-semantic version of the ANL test and investigate normal-hearing Danish and Swedish subjects' performance on these tests. DESIGN ANL was m...

in recent years, sub-band speech recognition has been found useful in addressing the need for robustness in speech recognition, especially for the speech contaminated by band-limited noise. in sub-band speech recognition, the full band speech is divided into several frequency sub-bands, with the result of the recognition task given by the combination of the sub-band feature vectors or their lik...

This study which included 23 experienced hearing aid users replicated several of the experiments reported in Gatehouse et al (2003, 2006) with new speech test material, language, and test procedure. The performance measure used was SNR required for 80% correct words in a sentence test. Consistent with Gatehouse et al, this study indicated that subjects showing a low score in a cognitive test (v...

Sparse Classification (SC) is an exemplar-based approach to Automatic Speech Recognition. By representing noisy speech as a sparse linear combination of speech and noise exemplars, SC allows separating speech from noise. The approach has shown its robustness in noisy conditions, but at the cost of degradation in clean conditions. In this work, rather than using the state probability estimates o...

OBJECTIVE The development of a test of virtual speech intelligibility in noise that enables assessment in typical, everyday listening situations. To eliminate extraneous confounding factors, digital signal processing was incorporated to simulate listening environments and source locations and allow presentation of stimuli via earphones. DESIGN Source-to-eardrum transfer functions measured on ...

Objective: The development of a valid and reliable Afrikaans test of sentence recognition thresholds in noise. Design: A collection of sentences was developed, rated for naturalness and grammatical complexity, and digitally recorded using a female speaker. Sentences found to have similar psychometric curve slopes, with equivalent intelligibility at three different noise levels, were arranged in...