Cochlear implant (CI) users suffer from elevated speech-reception thresholds and may rely on lip reading. Traditional measures of spatial release from masking quantify speech-reception-threshold improvement with azimuthal separation of target speaker and interferers and with the listener facing the target speaker. Substantial benefits of orienting the head away from the target speaker were pred...

This study examined (1) the effects of noise on speech understanding and (2) whether performance in real-life noises could be predicted based on performance in steady-state speech-spectrum-shaped noise. The noise conditions included a steady-state speech-spectrum-shaped noise and six types of real-life noise. Thirty normal-hearing adults were tested using sentence materials from the Cantonese H...

Amplitude modulation (AM) and frequency modulation (FM) are commonly used in communication, but their relative contributions to speech recognition have not been fully explored. To bridge this gap, we derived slowly varying AM and FM from speech sounds and conducted listening tests using stimuli with different modulations in normal-hearing and cochlear-implant subjects. We found that although AM...

The clinical assessment of speech discrimination by professional audiologists is resource intensive. Yet discrepancies in language or dialect between the test subject and the audiologist may cause a significant bias in the test result. To address these issues, a speech audiometric test (SAT) has been designed to be language/dialect independent and to allow automated scoring by means of an MFCC-...

In many cases the intelligibility of speech in noise may be assumed independent of the absolute sound level; the speech-to-noise ratio (SNR) primarily determines intelligibility. However, at high sound levels, speech intelligibility is found to decrease. Subjective Speech Reception Threshold (SRT) measurements were performed at various speech and noise levels, and with various noise spectra. De...

Purpose The visual Text Reception Threshold (TRT) test (Zekveld et al., 2007) has been designed to assess modality-general factors relevant for speech perception in noise. In the last decade, the test has been adopted in audiology labs worldwide. The 1st aim of this study was to examine which factors best predict interindividual differences in the TRT. Second, we aimed to assess the relationshi...

Ginkgo biloba (EGb 761) as a phytotherapeutic agent used in otoneurology, psychiatry, and ophthalmology. We studied the efficacy of therapy with EGb 761 in 72 patients (44 male and 28 female) with chronic cochleovestibular disorders. We used pure-tone audiology, measuring pure-tone average, speech reception threshold, and speech discrimination score. Then we used craniocorpography to measure la...

How does noise affect perception of foreign accented speech? English sentences spoken by non-native talkers with various language backgrounds were presented to native speakers. The Speech Reception Threshold (SRT) was found for 5 different accent classes, and contrasted with noise-free intelligibility. Modest trends towards global differences in intelligibility based on accent class were found,...