The Adaptation to Mandarin-Accented English by Older, Hearing-Impaired Listeners Following Brief Exposure to the Accent.

Purpose The language processing of Mandarin-accented English (MAE) by older hearing-impaired (OHI), older normally hearing (NH), and younger NH listeners was explored. We examined whether OHI adults have more difficulty than NH listeners in recognizing and adapting to MAE speech productions after receiving brief training with the accent. Method Talker-independent adaptation was evaluated in an exposure training study design. Listeners were trained either by four MAE talkers or four Australian English talkers (control group) before listening to sentences presented by a novel MAE talker. Speech recognition for both the training sentences and the experimental sentences were compared between listener groups and between the training accents. Results Listeners in all three groups (OHI, older NH, younger NH) who had been trained by the MAE talkers showed higher odds of speech recognition than listeners trained by the Australian English talkers. The OHI listeners adapted to MAE to the same degree as the NH groups despite returning lower overall odds of recognizing MAE speech. Conclusions Older listeners with mild-to-moderate hearing loss were able to benefit as much from brief exposure to MAE as did the NH groups. This encouraging result suggests that OHI listeners have access to and can exploit the information present in a relatively brief sample of accented speech and generalize their learning to a novel MAE talker.

Environmental noise reduction configuration: Effects on preferences, satisfaction, and speech understanding.

The effects of four configurations of an environmental noise reduction (ENR) algorithm on preferences, speech understanding, and satisfaction were investigated. The gain reduction at 0 dB modulation depth was either 10 dB in all channels (ENR StrongFlat) or shaped from 2-10 dB across channels according to a speech importance function (ENR MildSII). This gain reduction was either invariant (ENR Constant) or varied with (ENR Variable) the noise level. Ten hearing-impaired participants blindly compared pairs of configurations in real-world situations and recorded their preferences. Sentence reception thresholds (SRTs) were measured in quiet and noise, and satisfaction was rated with speech in noise. Half of the participants preferred ENR MildSII and half preferred ENR StrongFlat. All preferred ENR Variable to ENR Constant. Overall, the preferred ENR configuration was preferred to ENR off in 90% of responses. No statistically significant effect on SRTs was found, but a clinically significant effect of up to 2 dB could not be ruled out from the available data. ENR significantly improved satisfaction for listening comfort, ease of speech understanding, and sound quality.