Technical Report of IEICE Japan, Vol. SP2004-155, pp. 7-12, 2005 (in Japanese)
A study of monosyllable enhancement for elderly listeners by steady-state suppression
K. Kobayashi, Y. Hatta, K. Yasu, N. Hodoshima, T. Arai and M. Shindo
Abstract: The hearing function of elderly people is generally degraded according to their aging process. As one phenomenon, the drop of hearing level in high frequencies and the abnormal growth of the temporal masking are found. In a previous study, Arai et al. (2002) suggested the steady-state suppression of the speech which improves speech intelligibility in reverberant environments. Steady-state portions are defined as those that have more energy, but are less crucial for speech perception. In this paper, we report the consonant enhancement of 24 consonant-vowel (CV) monosyllables by using the steady-state suppression. And we certified that the technique was effective to improve speech intelligibility according to the results of 50 elderly listeners. Especially, more improvements are detected for hearing-impaired subjects.
Keywords: consonant enhancement, hearing-impaired, steady-state suppression, elderly listener, hearing aid