Effect of spatial separation, extended bandwidth, and compression speed on intelligibility in a competing-speech task

摘要: The benefit for speech intelligibility of extending the bandwidth hearing aids was assessed when target (sentences) and background (two talkers) were co-located or spatially separated. Also, relative benefits slow fast compression assessed. Sixteen hearing-impaired (HI) subjects with mild-to-moderate high-frequency loss eight normal-hearing (NH) tested. interfering sounds recorded using a KEMAR manikin located at ±60° azimuth, either Simulated binaural hearing-aid processing five-channel performed offline, gains set individually each HI subject. Upper cutoff frequencies 5, 7.5, 10 kHz. Processed stimuli presented via headphones. For both NH (unaided) subjects, there no significant effect frequency condition, but small from increasing 5 to 7.5 kHz separated condition. gave slightly significantly higher scores than not There marked individual differences in extended compression.