The effect of compression speed on intelligibility: simulated hearing-aid processing with and without original...

Hearing aids use amplitude compression to compensate for the effects of loudness recruitment. The compression speed that gives the best speech intelligibility varies among individuals. Moore [(2008). Trends Amplif. 12, 300-315] suggested that an individual's sensitivity to temporal fine structure (TFS) information may affect which compression speed gives most benefit. This hypothesis was tested using normal-hearing listeners with a simulated hearing loss. Sentences in a competing talker background were processed using multi-channel fast or slow compression followed by a simulation of threshold elevation and loudness recruitment. Signals were either tone vocoded with 1-ERB(N)-wide channels (where ERB(N) is the bandwidth of normal auditory filters) to remove the original TFS information, or not processed further. In a second experiment, signals were vocoded with either 1 - or 2-ERB(N)-wide channels, to test whether the available spectral detail affects the optimal compression speed. Intelligibility was significantly better for fast than slow compression regardless of vocoder channel bandwidth. The results suggest that the availability of original TFS or detailed spectral information does not affect the optimal compression speed. This conclusion is tentative, since while the vocoder processing removed the original TFS information, listeners may have used the altered TFS in the vocoded signals.