A HEARING MODEL TO ESTIMATE MANDARIN SPEECH INTELLIGIBILITY FOR THE HEARING IMPAIRED PATIENTS

Abstract

A hearing model, which is parameterized by hearing thresholds, degrees of loudness recruitment and reductions of frequency resolution of a hearing-impaired (HI) patient, is proposed in this paper. The model is developed in the filter-bank framework and is flexible for fitting hearing-loss conditions of HI patients. Psychoacoustic experiments were conducted under clean and noisy conditions to validate the model's capability in predicting Mandarin speech intelligibility for HI patients. Statistical analysis on the hearing-test results suggests that the proposed model can predict Mandarin speech intelligibility for HI patients to a certain degree.