TY - JOUR
T1 - Effect of improving audibility on better-ear glimpsing using non-linear amplification
AU - Rana, Baljeet
AU - Buchholz, Jörg M.
N1 - Copyright 2018 Acoustical Society of America. This article may be downloaded for personal use only. Any other use requires prior permission of the author and the Acoustical Society of America. The following article appeared in Rana, B., & Buchholz, J. M. (2018). Effect of improving audibility on better-ear glimpsing using non-linear amplification. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 144(6), 3465-3474 and may be found at https://doi.org/10.1121/1.5083823
PY - 2018/12
Y1 - 2018/12
N2 - Better-ear glimpsing (BEG) utilizes interaural level differences (ILDs) to improve speech intelligibility in noise. This spatial benefit is reduced in most hearing-impaired (HI) listeners due to their increased hearing loss at high frequencies. Even though this benefit can be improved by providing increased amplification, the improvement is limited by loudness discomfort. An alternative solution therefore extends ILDs to low frequencies, which has been shown to provide a substantial benefit from BEG. In contrast to previous studies, which only applied linear stimulus manipulations, wide dynamic range compression was applied here to improve the audibility of soft sounds while ensuring loudness comfort for loud sounds. Performance in both speech intelligibility and BEG was measured in 13 HI listeners at three different masker levels and for different interaural stimulus manipulations. The results revealed that at low signal levels, performance substantially improved with increasing masker level, but this improvement was reduced by the compressive behaviour at higher levels. Moreover, artificially extending ILDs by applying infinite (broadband) ILDs provided an extra spatial benefit in speech reception thresholds of up to 5 dB on top of that already provided by natural ILDs and interaural time differences, which increased with increasing signal level.
AB - Better-ear glimpsing (BEG) utilizes interaural level differences (ILDs) to improve speech intelligibility in noise. This spatial benefit is reduced in most hearing-impaired (HI) listeners due to their increased hearing loss at high frequencies. Even though this benefit can be improved by providing increased amplification, the improvement is limited by loudness discomfort. An alternative solution therefore extends ILDs to low frequencies, which has been shown to provide a substantial benefit from BEG. In contrast to previous studies, which only applied linear stimulus manipulations, wide dynamic range compression was applied here to improve the audibility of soft sounds while ensuring loudness comfort for loud sounds. Performance in both speech intelligibility and BEG was measured in 13 HI listeners at three different masker levels and for different interaural stimulus manipulations. The results revealed that at low signal levels, performance substantially improved with increasing masker level, but this improvement was reduced by the compressive behaviour at higher levels. Moreover, artificially extending ILDs by applying infinite (broadband) ILDs provided an extra spatial benefit in speech reception thresholds of up to 5 dB on top of that already provided by natural ILDs and interaural time differences, which increased with increasing signal level.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85059295401&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://purl.org/au-research/grants/nhmrc/1056332
U2 - 10.1121/1.5083823
DO - 10.1121/1.5083823
M3 - Article
C2 - 30599669
AN - SCOPUS:85059295401
VL - 144
SP - 3465
EP - 3474
JO - The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America
JF - The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America
SN - 0001-4966
IS - 6
ER -