Using psychophysical judgments to investigate speech intelligibility in background noise in normal hearing and hearing impaired subjects

Abstract

The speech perception in background noise was investigated through psychophysical judgments in groups of young listeners with normal hearing, adults and elders with hearing loss. Ratio and interval scales were used to estimate the intelligibility of everyday-sentences presented with cocktail noise at three different signal-to-noise ratios. According to the results, the intelligibility of sentences improved as the signal-to-noise ratio increased, which was observed in the three groups, although differences between groups was found in the intelligibility judgments. Both psychophysical scaling methods were valid and reliable to perform this evaluation which showed to be effective to measure speech intelligibility. However, further studies are desirable before clinical usage can be done with this evaluation method.