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Magnitude Estimation Of The Quality And Intelligibility Of Degraded Speech, Theresa Smith

Masters Theses

The purpose of the study was to identify within-group and between-group differences in perceived quality and perceived intelligibility of degraded speech for listeners with normal and impaired hearing. Following a visual magnitude estimation task, 10 subjects with normal hearing and 10 subjects with sensory-neural hearing impairment listened to connected speech samples degraded by seven levels of harmonic distortion and estimated the magnitude of their quality and intelligibility. Log average quality estimates and log average intelligibility estimates varied linearly with log degradation values for each group. The slopes of the log-log functions were interpreted as measures of perceptual sensitivity. Slopes for …