Speech Intelligibility Enhancement in the context of Hearing -Impairment

ABSTRACT The current paper focuses on the enhancement of an important attribute of clear speech, consonant-vowel Intensity Ratio on listeners suffering from Sensorineural hearing loss. This work is an extension of author’s previous papers. A case for synthetic clear speech in the context of hearing impairment was tested on (i) Hearing Impaired subjects, and (ii) Normal hearing subjects in the presence of masking noise ( +6dB, +12 dB). Consonant recognition in noise free and noisy situations using nonsense syllable test was investigated. The Stops and Fricative consonants of English language with cardinal vowels were processed for consonant-vowel intensity modifications ranging from 0dB to + 12dB at 3dB step. The speech perception in noise tests were quantified in terms of Consonant Recognition scores and Information transmission analysis measures. The results reported that the consonant-vowel intensity ratio modification of +9 to +12dB has positive effect on speech intelligibility improvement for both Hearing-impaired and Normal-hearing listeners. The maximum intelligibility benefit in Information transmitted scores were reported as 44, 45 percent points for HI listeners and 18, 31 percent points for masked normal-hearing listeners for /SV/ and /FV/ syllables respectively