Abstract
Speech perception in difficult listening conditions depends highly on the temporal processing ability of the auditory pathway. In the present study, we investigate the inter-subject variability of young normal-hearing listeners in the identification of time-compressed speech and how the ability to identify time-compressed speech, as assessed by the speech reception threshold (SRTrate: the speech rate at which 50% of the speech is perceived correctly) is associated with the ability to identify speech in unmodulated (SRTunmod) and modulated noise (SRTmod). These tasks are highly dependent on the temporal processing abilities of the auditory pathway. We observed a large inter-subject variability in the SRTrate and found that it is significantly correlated with the SRT when listening to unmodulated and modulated noise. Furthermore, we found that listeners who are better at perceiving speech at high rates are better in listening to speech in modulated noise. This effect persisted even when controlling for their ability to perceive speech in unmodulated noise. In addition, we also found that an increase in speech rate from 2.7 to 6.6 syllables per second resulted in a reduction in glimpsing of 5.3 dB when listening to speech in a 4-Hz amplitude-modulated masker, even though speech in quiet was 100% intelligible at both rates. These results indicate that the ability of young normal-hearing individuals to efficiently process temporal features of speech is an imperative factor when listening to speech in difficult listening situations.
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Data Availability
Data is available from the authors upon reasonable request.
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Acknowledgements
All subjects are thanked for taking the time to participate. Iris Van de Ryck and Jente Verbesselt are thanked for their help with the data collection. Students from the Master’s program Speech Language Pathology and Audiology Sciences at the KU Leuven are thanked for their help with the segmentation of the speech corpus. Associate editor Prof. Dr. Christian Lorenzi and two anonymous reviewers are thanked for their constructive feedback.
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FWO (G.0662.13) and the HermesFonds (IWT-14124) funded this research.
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R. G. and J. W. elaborated the concept of the study; R. G., A. V. W., and J. W. designed the experiments R. G. and A. V. W. oversaw the segmentation of the speech corpus; R. G. was responsible for the data collection. R. G and J. W. analyzed the results; R. G drafted the paper with input from all other authors.
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Gransier, R., van Wieringen, A. & Wouters, J. The Intelligibility of Time-Compressed Speech Is Correlated with the Ability to Listen in Modulated Noise. JARO 23, 413–426 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10162-021-00832-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10162-021-00832-0