A Speech Perception Test in Simulated Reverberation Conditions.

Area of Science:

• Audiology
• Speech Science
• Acoustics

Background:

• Assessing speech perception in noisy environments is crucial for hearing device users.
• Simulating real-world acoustic challenges, like reverberation, is essential for accurate evaluations.
• Existing speech tests may not fully capture the impact of reverberation on speech intelligibility.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop and validate new speech test materials (SPIN-Reverb) by applying reverberation treatments to sentences with varying contextual redundancy.
• To investigate the impact of different reverberation times (RT60) on speech perception for normal-hearing listeners and cochlear implant (CI) recipients.

Main Methods:

• Speech Perception in Noise-Revised (SPIN-R) sentences were modified to create SPIN-Reverb materials with four reverberation conditions (unprocessed, 600 ms, 1200 ms, 3600 ms RT60).
• Phase 1: List equivalency was established using nonparametric bootstrapping with 75 normal-hearing listeners.
• Phase 2: The utility of SPIN-Reverb was examined with 15 CI recipients.

Main Results:

• Equivalent lists were identified across all reverberation conditions.
• Speech perception performance significantly decreased with increasing reverberation time (RT60) for both high and low predictability sentences.
• All tested reverberation conditions (unprocessed, RevCond 1, 2, 3) were significantly different from each other.
• High- and low-predictability sentences showed significant differences within each reverberation condition.

Conclusions:

• The SPIN-Reverb materials, particularly RevCond 1 (600 ms) and RevCond 2 (1200 ms), show promise as supplementary tools for cochlear implant (CI) assessment.
• SPIN-Reverb offers a set of clinically feasible, graded difficulty materials that realistically simulate acoustic challenges for evaluating sensory devices.