Development of a Japanese Speaker Discrimination Test for Evaluation of Hearing Assistance Devices

For assessment of hearing assistance devices, a speaker discrimination test was developed. The speech material was drawn from a “Japanese phonetically balanced word speech database” which was developed by Electrotechnical Laboratory, Japan (ETL-WD corpus). The test consisted of ten words spoken by ten speakers. The words were selected considering familiarity, and the speakers were selected considering F0 and formant space size. To check the validity of the test, a series of hearing experiments was conducted. The stimuli of the experiments consisted of each sound of the test processed by a 1, 2, 4, 6, 8 and 12 channel cochlear implant simulator. The result showed that speaker discrimination score decreased according to degradation of the speech sounds. This result indicates the test score reflects the performance of hearing assistance devices and can thus be used to assess the devices.