Description
In many everyday listening situations, listeners face the challenge of having to follow a con-versation that may be embedded in a mixture of competing speech. Listeners with hearing loss are known to have large difficulties with such a task, and several environmental factors may increase this difficulty, including the number of talkers and reverberation. Here, we investi-gated how well young listeners with normal hearing and older listeners with hearing loss can follow a conversation in audio-visual scenes differing in terms of the number of concurrent talkers and the amount of reverberation. The number of talkers was either one, three or five. The reverberation conditions reflected an anechoic room, a living room and an unfinished-concrete room. The participants’ task was to find and locate an ongoing story (based on the general topic) in a mixture of other stories. Three-dimensional audio-visual scenes were simu-lated and presented via head-tracked headphones and virtual-reality glasses. The hearing-im-paired participants were tested with individual audibility compensation based on the NAL-RP fitting rule. The primary outcome measure was the time taken to identify the location of the target talker (i.e., the response time). The secondary outcome measure was the localization accuracy. For both groups, response times were longer when more talkers were present. Small amounts of reverberation did not affect the response times, while more reverberation led to increased response times when many talkers were present. While response times were longer for participants with hearing loss, no group differences with regards to the effects of the number of talkers and reverberation were observed. Regarding localization accuracy, participants with hearing loss showed poorer performance overall, and there was a clear effect of the number of talkers but not of reverberation. Overall, this new task may provide insight into the challenges experienced by listeners with hearing loss when tracking a conversation of interest in a complex audio-visual scene.| Period | 10 Aug 2022 → 14 Aug 2022 |
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| Event title | International Hearing Aid Research Conference |
| Event type | Conference |
| Location | Lake Tahoe, United States, CaliforniaShow on map |
| Degree of Recognition | International |