Work

The optimal threshold for removing noise from speech is similar across normal and impaired hearing—a time-frequency masking study

Year: 2019

Type: article

Abstract: Hearing-impaired listeners' intolerance to background noise during speech perception is well known. The current study employed speech materials free of ceiling effects to reveal the optimal trade-off between rejecting noise and retaining speech during time-frequency masking. This relative criterion value (-7 dB) was found to hold across noise types that differ in acoustic spectro-temporal complexity. It was also found that listeners with hearing impairment and those with normal hearing performed optimally at this same value, suggesting no true noise intolerance once time-frequency units containing speech are extracted.

Source: The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

DOI: 10.1121/1.5112828

Authors: Eric W. Healy, Jordan L. Vasko, DeLiang Wang

Institution: The Ohio State University

Language: English

Topic: Hearing Loss and Rehabilitation

Subfield: Cognitive Neuroscience

Field: Neuroscience

Domain: Life Sciences

Open Access status: hybrid

Funder: National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders

Awards: Speech segregation to improve intelligility of reverberant-noisy speech, Improving intelligibility in noise for hearing-impaired listeners