| 1. |
- Beechey, Timothy, et al.
(författare)
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Eliciting Naturalistic Conversations: A Method for Assessing Communication Ability, Subjective Experience, and the Impacts of Noise and Hearing Impairment
- 2019
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Ingår i: Journal of Speech, Language and Hearing Research. - : American Speech Language Hearing Association. - 1092-4388 .- 1558-9102. ; 62:2, s. 470-484
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Purpose: The purpose of this study was to introduce a method of eliciting conversational behavior with many aspects of realism, which may be used to study the impacts of hearing impairment and noise on verbal communication; to describe the characteristics of speech and language participants produced during the task; and to assess participants' engagement and motivation while completing the task.Method: Twenty young adults with normal hearing and 20 older adults with hearing impairment took part in face-to-face conversations while completing a referential communication puzzle task designed to elicit natural conversational speech production and language with a number of realistic characteristics. Participants rated the difficulty and relevance of acoustic scenes for communication and their engagement in conversations.Results: The communication task elicited speech production in a natural conversational register and language with many realistic characteristics, including complex linguistic constructions and typical disfluencies found in everyday speech, and approximately balanced contributions within dyads. Subjective ratings suggest that the task is robust to learning and fatigue effects and that participants remained highly engaged throughout the experiment. All participants were able to maintain successful communication regardless of background noise level and degree of hearing impairment.Conclusions: The communication task described here may be used as part of a functional assessment of the ability to communicate in the presence of noise and hearing impairment. Although existing speech assessments have many strengths, they do not take into account the inherently interactive nature of spoken communication or the effects of motivation and engagement.
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| 2. |
- Beechey, Timothy, et al.
(författare)
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Hearing Aid Amplification Reduces Communication Effort of People With Hearing Impairment and Their Conversation Partners
- 2020
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Ingår i: Journal of Speech, Language and Hearing Research. - : American Speech-Language-Hearing Association. - 1092-4388 .- 1558-9102. ; 63:4, s. 1299-1311
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- ObjectivesThis study investigates the hypothesis that hearing aid amplification reduces effort within conversation for both hearing aid wearers and their communication partners. Levels of effort, in the form of speech production modifications, required to maintain successful spoken communication in a range of acoustic environments are compared to earlier reported results measured in unaided conversation conditions.DesignFifteen young adult normal-hearing participants and 15 older adult hearing-impaired participants were tested in pairs. Each pair consisted of one young normal-hearing participant and one older hearing-impaired participant. Hearing-impaired participants received directional hearing aid amplification, according to their audiogram, via a master hearing aid with gain provided according to the NAL-NL2 fitting formula. Pairs of participants were required to take part in naturalistic conversations through the use of a referential communication task. Each pair took part in five conversations, each of 5-min duration. During each conversation, participants were exposed to one of five different realistic acoustic environments presented through highly open headphones. The ordering of acoustic environments across experimental blocks was pseudorandomized. Resulting recordings of conversational speech were analyzed to determine the magnitude of speech modifications, in terms of vocal level and spectrum, produced by normal-hearing talkers as a function of both acoustic environment and the degree of high-frequency average hearing impairment of their conversation partner.ResultsThe magnitude of spectral modifications of speech produced by normal-hearing talkers during conversations with aided hearing-impaired interlocutors was smaller than the speech modifications observed during conversations between the same pairs of participants in the absence of hearing aid amplification.ConclusionsThe provision of hearing aid amplification reduces the effort required to maintain communication in adverse conditions. This reduction in effort provides benefit to hearing-impaired individuals and also to the conversation partners of hearing-impaired individuals. By considering the impact of amplification on both sides of dyadic conversations, this approach contributes to an increased understanding of the likely impact of hearing impairment on everyday communication.
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| 3. |
- Beechey, Timothy, et al.
(författare)
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Hearing Impairment Increases Communication Effort During Conversations in Noise
- 2020
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Ingår i: Journal of Speech, Language and Hearing Research. - : American Speech-Language-Hearing Association. - 1092-4388 .- 1558-9102. ; 63:1, s. 305-320
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- PurposeThis article describes patterns of speech modifications produced by talkers as a function of the degree of hearing impairment of communication partners during naturalistic conversations in noise. An explanation of observed speech modifications is proposed in terms of a generalization of the concept of effort. This account complements existing theories of listening effort by extending the concept of effort to the domain of interactive communication.MethodTwenty young adult normal hearing participants and 20 older adult hearing-impaired participants were tested in pairs. Each pair consisted of 1 young normal hearing participant and 1 older hearing-impaired participant. Pairs of participants took part in naturalistic conversations through the use of a referential communication task. Each pair completed a 5-min conversation in each of 5 different realistic acoustic environments.ResultsTalkers modified their speech, in terms of level and spectrum, in a gradient manner reflecting both the acoustic environment and the degree of hearing impairment of their conversation partner. All pairs of participants were able to maintain communication across all acoustic environments regardless of degree of hearing impairment and the level of environmental noise. Contrasting effects of noise and hearing impairment on speech production revealed distinct patterns of speech modifications produced by normal hearing and hearing-impaired talkers during conversation. This may reflect the fact that only the speech modifications produced by normal hearing talkers functioned to compensate for the hearing impairment of a conversation partner.ConclusionsThe data presented support the concept of communication effort as a dynamic feedback system between conversation participants. Additionally, these results provide insight into the nature of realistic speech signals, which are encountered by people with hearing impairment in everyday communication scenarios.
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| 4. |
- Miles, Kelly M., et al.
(författare)
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Development of the Everyday Conversational Sentences in Noise test
- 2020
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Ingår i: Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. - : American Institute of Physics (AIP). - 0001-4966 .- 1520-8524. ; 147:3, s. 1562-1576
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- To capture the demands of real-world listening, laboratory-based speech-in-noise tasks must better reflect the types of speech and environments listeners encounter in everyday life. This article reports the development of original sentence materials that were produced spontaneously with varying vocal efforts. These sentences were extracted from conversations between a talker pair (female/male) communicating in different realistic acoustic environments to elicit normal, raised and loud vocal efforts. In total, 384 sentences were extracted to provide four equivalent lists of 16 sentences at the three efforts for the two talkers. The sentences were presented to 32 young, normally hearing participants in stationary noise at five signal-to-noise ratios from -8 to 0 dB in 2 dB steps. Psychometric functions were fitted for each sentence, revealing an average 50% speech reception threshold (SRT50) of -5.2 dB, and an average slope of 17.2%/dB. Sentences were then level-normalised to adjust their individual SRT50 to the mean (-5.2 dB). The sentences may be combined with realistic background noise to provide an assessment method that better captures the perceptual demands of everyday communication.
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| 5. |
- Weisser, Adam, et al.
(författare)
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The Ambisonic Recordings of Typical Environments (ARTE) Database
- 2019
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Ingår i: Acta Acoustica united with Acustica. - : S. Hirzel Verlag. - 1610-1928 .- 1861-9959. ; 105:4, s. 695-713
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Everyday listening environments are characterized by far more complex spatial, spectral and temporal sound field distributions than the acoustic stimuli that are typically employed in controlled laboratory settings. As such, the reproduction of acoustic listening environments has become important for several research avenues related to sound perception, such as hearing loss rehabilitation, soundscapes, speech communication, auditory scene analysis, automatic scene classification, and room acoustics. However, the recordings of acoustic environments that are used as test material in these research areas are usually designed specifically for one study, or are provided in custom databases that cannot be universally adapted, beyond their original application. In this work we present the Ambisonic Recordings of Typical Environments (ARTE) database, which addresses several research needs simultaneously: realistic audio recordings that can be reproduced in 3D, 2D, or binaurally, with known acoustic properties, including absolute level and room impulse response. Multichannel higher-order ambisonic recordings of 13 realistic typical environments (e.g., office, cafè, dinner party, train station) were processed, acoustically analyzed, and subjectively evaluated to determine their perceived identity. The recordings are delivered in a generic format that may be reproduced with different hardware setups, and may also be used in binaural, or single-channel setups. Room impulse responses, as well as detailed acoustic analyses, of all environments supplement the recordings. The database is made open to the research community with the explicit intention to expand it in the future and include more scenes.
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