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- 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. |
- 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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