Perceived listening effort and speech intelligibility in reverberation and noise for hearing-impaired listeners

Abstract

Objective: The purpose of this study was to assess perceived listening effort and speech intelligibility in reverberant and noisy conditions for hearing-impaired listeners for conditions that are similar according to the speech transmission index (STI). Design: Scaled listening effort was measured in four different conditions at five different STI generated using various relative contributions of noise and reverberant interferences. Intelligibility was measured for a subset of conditions. Study sample: Twenty mildly to moderately hearing-impaired listeners. Results: In general, listening effort decreased and speech intelligibility increased with increasing STI. For simulated impulse responses consisting of white Gaussian noise exponentially decaying in time, a good agreement between conditions of different relative contributions of noise and reverberation was found. For real impulse responses, the STI slightly overestimated the effect of reverberation on the perceived listening effort and underestimated its effect on speech intelligibility. Including the average hearing loss in the calculation of the STI led to a better agreement between STI predictions and subjective data. Conclusion: Speech intelligibility and listening effort provide complementary tools to evaluate speech perception over a broad range of acoustic scenarios. In addition, when incorporating hearing loss information the STI provides a rough prediction of listening effort in these acoustic scenarios.

Key Words:

• Listening effort
• speech intelligibility
• hearing-impaired
• speech transmission index

Declaration of interest

The authors report no conflict of interest. This work was supported in part by federal resources of Niedersächsisches Vorab by the Lower Saxonian Ministry of Science and Culture, research focus “Hearing in everyday life (HALLO)” and the Research Unit FOR 1732 “Individualized Hearing Acoustics” funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). Language services were provided by www.stels-ol.de.