Evaluation of a dereverberation technique with normal and impaired listeners

Increasing amounts of room reverberation generally reduce speech intelligibility for both normal and sensorineurally impaired listeners--with the latter group suffering proportionately more. We have implemented a two-input dereverberation technique (Allen et al., 1977) in order to evaluate whether intelligibility scores can be improved by this processing. Reverberated and dereverberated (processed) monosyllable, CVC words were presented monaurally to normal and impaired listeners in both a 2AFC test and an open-response test. Preliminary results for both groups indicate that although perceived and measured reverberation time is clearly reduced by processing, mean recognition scores--evaluated over words and phonemes--are not significantly altered.