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. ...

Speech constitutes much of the communicated information; most other perceived audio signals do not carry nearly as much information. Indeed, much of the non-speech signals maybe classified as ‘noise’ in human communication. The process of separating conversational speech and noise is termed voice activity detection (VAD). This paper describes a new approach to VAD which is based on the Wavelet ...

Background: Hearing loss is one of the common complaints of diabetics. The aim of this study was to evaluate the hearing status of diabetic patients in Babol, North of Iran. Methods: The hearing status of 50 type 2 diabetic patients (case group) and 50 healthy individuals (control group) were evaluated from October 2011 to September 2012. Audiometry was done with the frequencies of 250, 500, 1...

background: speech perception ability depends on auditory and extra-auditory elements. the signal-to-noise ratio (snr) is an extra-auditory element that has an effect on the ability to normally follow speech and maintain a conversation. speech in noise perception difficulty is a common complaint of the elderly. in this study, the importance of snr magnitude as an extra-auditory effect on speech...

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...

Students of speech therapy and audiology are often faced with the difficulty of obtaining a realistic view of the speech reception abilites of the hearing impaired. Illustrating speech recognition defects is a demanding task for the teaching staff, too. To improve the students’ awareness of the effects of hearing defects, an interactive multimedia programme allowing simulation of various types ...

A previously-tested transient noise reduction (TNR) algorithm for cochlear implant (CI) users was modified to detect and attenuate transients independently across multiple frequency-bands. Since speech and transient noise are often spectrally distinct, we hypothesized that benefits in speech intelligibility can be achieved over the earlier single-band design. Fifteen experienced CI users (49 to...

Gaussian Mixture Models (GMMs) of power spectral densities of speech and noise are used with explicit Bayesian estimations in Wiener filtering of noisy speech. No assumption is made on the nature or stationarity of the noise. No voice activity detection (VAD) or any other means is employed to estimate the input SNR. The GMM mean vectors are used to form sets of over-determined system of equatio...