Assessing the effects of hearing loss on speech intelligibility in reverberant environments

It has been shown that listeners with sensorineural hearing loss (SNHL) have difficulties in understanding speech in simulated reverberant environments even when wearing assistive devices such as hearing aids. However, a number of limiting factors such as poor hearing loss compensation, over simplified acoustic simulations of reverberant environments and dated statistical analysis have led to a lack of a clear understanding of the specific factors that cause hearing-impaired listeners to have difficulties in reverberant environments. In this talk, we will present results from studies comparing normal-hearing and hearing-impaired listeners: 1) Monaural and binaural modulation detection thresholds measured with anechoic and reverberant stimuli with different carriers and 2) Speech intelligibility in typical reverberant and noisy listening environments exploring a range of acoustic parameters, such as the level of reverberation, the type of noise and various signal-to-noise ratios. Furthermore, the effect of...