(2007-08) Wolters, Maria; Campbell, Pauline; DePlacido, Christine; Liddell, Amy; Owens, David; This research was funded by the EPSRC/BBSRC initiative SPARC and by the SFC grant MATCH (grant no. HR04016).
Many factors affect the intelligibility of synthetic
speech. One aspect that has been severely neglected
in past work is hearing loss. In this study, we investigate
whether pure-tone audiometry thresholds
across a wide range of frequencies (0.25-20kHz)
are correlated with participants' performance on a
simple task that involves accurately recalling and
processing reminders. Participants' scores correlate
not only with thresholds in the frequency ranges
commonly associated with speech, but also with extended
high-frequency thresholds.
