OBJECTIVES The goal of the present study was to examine whether Acceptable Noise Levels (ANLs) would be lower (greater acceptance of noise) in binaural listening than in monaural listening condition and also whether meaningfulness of background speech noise would affect ANLs for directional microphone hearing aid users. In addition, any relationships between the individual binaural benefits on ...

A limited number of research developments in the field of speech enhancement have been implemented into commercially available hearing-aids. However, even sophisticated aids remain ineffective in environments where there is overwhelming noise present. Human performance in such situations is known to be dependent upon input from both the aural and visual senses that are then combined by sophisti...

This study aimed at investigating the effect of visual (Cuisenaire Rods) and auditory nonsensical monosyllables using Pratt speech processing software as teaching techniques on retention of word stress. To this end, 60 high school participants made the two experimental groups of the study each having 30 students on the basis of their proficiency scores on KET (Key English Test). In one experime...

In recent years, speech development has become an interesting area in the field of signal processing especially in the applications of hearing aids. In hearing aid applications, the speech enhancement technique has been employed mainly for dipping the additive background noise. During the speech enhancement process, high background noise occurs due to the rapture nature of the speech. In order ...

The purpose of this study was to investigate if applying hearing aid directional microphones and noise reduction algorithms as preprocessors to cochlear implant speech processors can enhance speech understanding and listening preference of cochlear implant users. Hearing aid preprocessed speech materials were recorded when KEMAR was wearing a pair of nine-channel digital hearing aids and sittin...

This paper is concerned with automatic speech recognition (ASR) for accented speech. Given a small amount of speech from a new speaker, is it better to apply speaker adaptation to the baseline, or to use accent identification (AID) to identify the speaker’s accent and select an accent-dependent acoustic model? Three accent-based model selection methods are investigated: using the ‘true’ accent ...

BACKGROUND The use of bilateral amplification is now common clinical practice for hearing aid users but not for cochlear implant recipients. In the past, most cochlear implant recipients were implanted in one ear and wore only a monaural cochlear implant processor. There has been recent interest in benefits arising from bilateral stimulation that may be present for cochlear implant recipients. ...

Although most clinical tests focus on how much a particular hearing aid improves speech audibility under controlled conditions, it is unclear how these measures relate to hearing aid effectiveness, or the benefit perceived by the patient under everyday conditions. In this study, the relationship between audibility and hearing aid effectiveness was examined in a cohort of patients who obtained h...