Document Type
Article
Journal/Book Title/Conference
The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America
Volume
145
Issue
2
Publisher
Acoustical Society of America
Publication Date
2-14-2019
First Page
822
Last Page
830
Abstract
The Speech Intelligibility Index includes a series of frequency importance functions for calculating the estimated intelligibility of speech under various conditions. Until recently, techniques to derive frequency importance required averaging data over a group of listeners, thus hindering the ability to observe individual differences due to factors such as hearing loss. In the current study, the “random combination strategy” [Bosen and Chatterjee (2016). J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 140, 3718–3727] was used to derive frequency importance functions for individual hearing-impaired listeners, and normal-hearing participants for comparison. Functions were measured by filtering sentences to contain only random subsets of frequency bands on each trial, and regressing speech recognition against the presence or absence of bands across trials. Results show that the contribution of each band to speech recognition was inversely proportional to audiometric threshold in that frequency region, likely due to reduced audibility, even though stimuli were shaped to compensate for each individual's hearing loss. The results presented in this paper demonstrate that this method is sensitive to factors that alter the shape of frequency importance functions within individuals with hearing loss, which could be used to characterize the impact of audibility or other factors related to suprathreshold deficits or hearing aid processing strategies.
Recommended Citation
Yoho, Sarah E., and Adam K. Bosen. “Individualized Frequency Importance Functions for Listeners with Sensorineural Hearing Loss.” The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, vol. 145, no. 2, 2019, pp. 822–830. doi:10.1121/1.5090495.
Comments
The following article appeared in Yoho, Sarah E., and Adam K. Bosen. “Individualized Frequency Importance Functions for Listeners with Sensorineural Hearing Loss.” The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, vol. 145, no. 2, 2019, pp. 822–830. doi:10.1121/1.5090495 and may be found at https://asa.scitation.org/doi/abs/10.1121/1.5090495.