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A Study of Acoustic Masking Effect from Formant Enhancement in Digital Hearing Aid  

Jeon, Yu-Yong (Electronic Engineering, Inha University)
Kil, Se-Kee (Institute for Information and Electronics Research)
Yoon, Kwang-Sub (Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Inha University)
Lee, Sang-Min (Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Inha University)
Publication Information
Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SC / v.45, no.5, 2008 , pp. 13-20 More about this Journal
Abstract
Although digital hearing aid algorithms have been developed to compensate hearing loss and to help hearing impaired people to communicate with others, digital hearing aid user still complain about difficulty of hearing the speech. The reason could be the quality of speech through digital hearing aid is insufficient to understand the speech caused by feedback, residual noise and etc. And another thing is masking effect among formants that makes sound quality low. In this study, we measured the masking characteristics of normal listeners and hearing impaired listeners having presbyacusis to confirm masking effect in speech itself. The experiment is composed of 5 tests; pure tone test, speech reception threshold (SRT) test, word recognition score (WRS) test, puretone masking test and speech masking test. In speech masking test, there are 25 speeches in each speech set. And log likelihood ratio (LLR) is introduced to evaluate the distortion of each speech objectively. As a result, the speech perception became lower by increasing the quantity of formant enhancement. And each enhanced speech in a speech set has statistically similar LLR, however speech perception is not. It means that acoustic masking effect rather than distortion influences speech perception. In actuality, according to the result of frequency analysis of the speech that people can not answer correctly, level difference between first formant and second formant is about 35dB, and it is similar to result of pure tone masking test(normal hearing subject:36.36dB, hearing impaired subject:32.86dB). Characteristics of masking effect is not similar between normal listeners and hearing impaired listeners. So it is required to check the characteristics of masking effect before wearing a hearing aid and to apply this characteristics to fitting.
Keywords
hearing aid; acoustic masking; formant enhancement;
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