Similarity of the effects of reverberation on speech intelligibility in noise for hearing-impaired and normal-hearing listeners

Hearing-impaired (HI) listeners experience difficulties to understand speech in noisy environments. The aim of this study was to determine whether they are more affected by the detrimental effects of reverberation than normal-hearing (NH) listeners. Intelligibility tests were done for NH listeners and HI listeners with various degrees of hearing loss, using headphones and real-room binaural impulse responses to simulate several spatial configurations. This allowed us to investigate different effects of reverberation on speech intelligibility in noise: the temporal smearing of the target speech impairing its intelligibility, the temporal smearing of modulated noise maskers reducing the opportunity for dip listening, and the detrimental effects of reverberation on spatial release from masking (SRM). The results indicate that the HI and NH listeners were similarly affected by reverberation. The tested conditions did not reveal any effect of hearing loss asymmetry on SRM, potentially because the main asymmetries were partly compensated for by the linear amplification applied to the stimuli for the HI listeners. Finally, the data could be described reasonably well using a binaural speech intelligibility model.