Increased global interaction has led to increased communication between individuals with wide ranging linguistic experience. As a consequence, the ramifications of accent in speech production need to be better understood. It is plausible that differences in speech intelligibility due to accent type affect gross intelligibility in different ways. These differences may be differentially affected ...

The performance of a two-sensor based, frequency-domain minimum-variance beamforming algorithm (FMV) to extract a signal in the presence of multiple interferers was evaluated. Speech reception thresholds (SRT) and speech intelligibility measures were obtained from listeners with normal hearing or with mild-to-moderate sensorineural hearing loss. Word and sentence length stimuli were processed t...

A conventional measure to determine the ability to understand speech in noisy backgrounds is the so-called speech reception threshold (SRT) for sentences. It yields the signal-to-noise ratio (in dB) for which half of the sentences are correctly perceived. The SRT defines to what degree speech must be audible to a listener in order to become just intelligible. There are indications that elderly ...

The main purpose of this study was to prepare Polish sentence tests for measuring speech intelligibility against an interfering noise. The tests were developed from meaningful sentences taken from everyday utterances, TV, literature etc. Two sets of sentence lists were created. The first set was optimized for the so-called binary scoring and was composed of 25 lists of 20 sentences each, while ...

Recent psychophysical studies suggest that human listeners do not segregate concurrent sounds by grouping frequency regions that have a common interaural time difference (ITD). However, such an approach is adopted by most computational auditory scene analysis (CASA) systems that use binaural cues. Here, we propose a CASA system that separates a target speech signal from a noise interferer, but ...

An acceptable noise level (ANL) procedure for measuring hearing aid directional benefit was compared with masked speech reception threshold (SRT) and front-to-back ratio (FBR) procedures. ANL is the difference between the most comfortable listening level and the maximum accepted background noise level while listening to speech. Forty adult subjects wearing their own binaural hearing aids were e...

INTRODUCTION Different types of prosthesis are available for stapes replacement. Because there has been no published report on the efficacy of the titanium soft-clip vs the fluoroplastic Causse loop Teflon piston, we compared short-term hearing results of both types of prosthesis in patients who underwent stapedotomy due to otosclerosis. MATERIALS AND METHODS A total of 57 ears were included ...

OBJECTIVES Cochlear implants are a standard therapy for deafness, yet the ability of implanted patients to understand speech varies widely. To better understand this variability in outcomes, the authors used functional near-infrared spectroscopy to image activity within regions of the auditory cortex and compare the results to behavioral measures of speech perception. DESIGN The authors studi...

It is often assumed that the benefit of hearing aids is not primarily reflected in better speech performance, but that it is reflected in less effortful listening in the aided than in the unaided condition. Before being able to assess such a hearing aid benefit the present study examined how processing load while listening to masked speech relates to inter-individual differences in cognitive ab...