Contribution
Audio-visual scene analysis in aided and unaided listeners with normal and impaired hearing
* Presenting author
Abstract:
In many everyday listening situations, listeners face the challenge of having to follow a conversation 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. Hearing-assistive devices such as hearing aids have been shown to improve speech perception in static listening situations but to a lesser extent in dynamic situations with moving listeners. I will present a series of experiments where we investigated localization accuracy, speech perception and movement behavior in a dynamic listening task where the participants task was to find and locate an ongoing story (based on the general topic) in a mixture of other stories. In this task the number of talkers and the amount of reverberation was varied. Three-dimensional audio-visual scenes were simulated and presented via a loudspeaker array and virtual-reality glasses. Experiments were conducted with listeners with normal and impaired hearing, as well as with different hearing aid settings. Overall, this paradigm may provide insight into the challenges experienced by listeners with hearing loss when tracking a conversation of interest in a complex audio-visual scene.