OBJECTIVE Everyday life includes fluctuating noise levels, resulting in continuously changing speech intelligibility. The study aims were: (1) to quantify the amount of decrease in age-related speech perception, as a result of increasing noise level, and (2) to test the effect of age on context usage at the word level (smaller amount of contextual cues). PATIENTS AND METHODS A total of 24 you...

In a collaborative research project, several monaural and binaural noise reduction algorithms have been comprehensively evaluated. In this article, eight selected noise reduction algorithms were assessed using instrumental measures, with a focus on the instrumental evaluation of speech intelligibility. Four distinct, reverberant scenarios were created to reflect everyday listening situations: a...

Background noise challenges auditory recognition of speech and may reveal the underlying deficits in word skills. Previous studies have reported an association between children’s skills various linguistic skills, including phonology, although some languages only. However, language-specific features influence these connections. This study describes associations ability phonological a representat...

In this paper, we present a robust real-time sound source localization system implemented on a social robot platform developed in Institute for Infocomm Research, Singapore. The audio localization system provides the robot with auditory senses and enables the robot to direct its face to a speaker outside its frontal vision system. As the localization system exploits time difference of arrival (...

A speech-in-multitalker-babble test instrument was developed for use in a Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) multicenter study examining the effects of hearing loss on self-perceived quality of life. Word recognition in quiet and in multitalker babble was measured on 24 listeners with normal hearing and 24 listeners with sensorineural hearing loss. The protocol involved the presentation of 10 ...

A simple word-recognition task in multitalker babble for clinic use was developed in the course of four experiments involving listeners with normal hearing and listeners with hearing loss. In Experiments 1 and 2, psychometric functions for the individual NU No. 6 words from Lists 2, 3, and 4 were obtained with each word in a unique segment of multitalker babble. The test paradigm that emerged i...

PURPOSE To investigate the effect of listener's native language (L1) and the types of noise on English vowel identification in noise. METHOD Identification of 12 English vowels was measured in quiet and in long-term speech-shaped noise and multi-talker babble (MTB) noise for English- (EN), Chinese- (CN) and Korean-native (KN) listeners at various signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs). RESULTS Compa...

OBJECTIVE To evaluate the impact of multi-talker babble on cortical event-related potentials (ERPs), specifically the N400, in a spoken semantic priming paradigm. DESIGN Participants listened in quiet and with background babble to word triplets, evaluating whether the third word was related to the preceding words. A temporo-spatial principal component analysis was conducted on ERPs to the fir...