Effects of NALR on consonant-vowel perception
Abstract
Consonant vowel (CV) identification experiments in masking noise with 16 hearing-impaired (HI) ears at two different gain conditions, i.e., flat- gain (FG) and spectral correction (National Acoustic Laboratory Revised prescriptive procedure, NALR), were administered (Han, 2011). In both gain conditions, listeners were directed to adjust the presentation level to their most comfortable loudness (MCL). MCL testing runs contrary to the common approach of adjusting the presentation level, depending on the pure tone thresholds (PTTs) and the long term average speech spectrum (LTASS) (Posner and Ventry, 1977; Zurek and Delhorne, 1987). The results, however, prove that for speech testing MCL is justified. A more rigorous definition for audibility based on entropy in recognition experiments is provided. Furthermore, the effectiveness of NALR for CV perception is investigated. The average error went down from 20.1% (σ = 3.7) to 16.3% (σ = 2.8). For 50.5% of the token1-ear pairs (TEPs) the error and entropy both went down, while for 15.1% of the TEPs the entropy and error went up with NALR. In order to evaluate statistically siginificant effects of NALR, the confusion matrix data were clustered, and the number of ears which switched clusters when NALR was applied were investigated. In addition, the subjects’ confusions under both conditions were studied and compared to the confusions of other HI and normal-hearing (NH) subjects.
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