Toward an individual-specific model of impaired speech intelligibility
Abstract
Hearing-impaired listeners with similar quiet thresholds often show very different real-world speech intelligibility deficits in listening situations involving competing sounds. The current study is part of larger research project focused on: (1) examining how, and to what extent, these between-subject differences in speech recognition relate to differences in suprathreshold auditory functioning, and (2) on generating accurate, individualized models to predict auditory and auditory-visual speech recognition by hearing-impaired listeners in adverse listening conditions. Individual hearing-impaired and normal-hearing listeners are being tested on a range of psychoacoustic tasks intended to characterize auditory processing sensitivity along a variety of dimensions (frequency selectivity, peripheral compression, traveling wave dispersion, inner hair cell status, spectral and temporal modulation sensitivity and fine-structure processing). Here we report estimates of frequency selectivity and peripheral compression for hearing impaired listeners with similar audiograms and very different per- formance on speech in noise. Comparisons between hearing-impaired and normally-hearing subjects on psychoacoustic measures and their relation to speech recognition in noise will be discussed.
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