Revision, extension, and evaluation of a binaural speech intelligibility model

• Published in: The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America Vol. 127; no. 4; pp. 2479 - 2497
• Main Authors: Beutelmann, Rainer, Brand, Thomas, Kollmeier, Birger
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Melville, NY Acoustical Society of America 01.04.2010; American Institute of Physics
• Subjects: Acoustics; Adult; Aged; Aged, 80 and over; Audiology; Audiometry, Pure-Tone; Audition; Auditory Threshold; Binaural Stimulation; Biological and medical sciences; Case-Control Studies; Comprehension; Computer Modeling and Simulation; Computer Simulation; Facility Design and Construction; Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology; Hearing Disorders; Hearing Loss - psychology; Humans; Intelligibility; Language; Middle Aged; Models, Psychological; Noise - adverse effects; Perception; Perceptual Masking; Persons With Hearing Impairments - psychology; Production and perception of spoken language; Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry; Psychology. Psychophysiology; Reproducibility of Results; Signal Detection, Psychological; Sound Localization; Sound Spectrography; Speech Discrimination Tests; Speech Intelligibility; Speech Perception; Speech Reception Thresholds; Time Factors; Binaural hearing; Modeling; Verbal comprehension
• ISSN: 0001-4966; 1520-8524; 1520-8524
• DOI: 10.1121/1.3295575

This study presents revision, extension, and evaluation of a binaural speech intelligibility model ( Beutelmann, R. , and Brand, T. ( 2006 ). J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 120 , 331-342 ) that yields accurate predictions of speech reception thresholds (SRTs) in the presence of a stationary noise source at arbitrary azimuths and in different rooms. The modified model is based on an analytical expression of binaural unmasking for arbitrary input signals and is computationally more efficient, while maintaining the prediction quality of the original model. An extension for nonstationary interferers was realized by applying the model to short time frames of the input signals and averaging over the predicted SRT results. Binaural SRTs from 8 normal-hearing and 12 hearing-impaired subjects, incorporating all combinations of four rooms, three source setups, and three noise types were measured and compared to the model's predictions. Depending on the noise type, the parametric correlation coefficients between observed and predicted SRTs were 0.80-0.93 for normal-hearing subjects and 0.59-0.80 for hearing-impaired subjects. The mean absolute prediction error was 3 dB for the mean normal-hearing data and 4 dB for the individual hearing-impaired data. 70% of the variance of the SRTs of hearing-impaired subjects could be explained by the model, which is based only on the audiogram.