On the Use of Acoustic Simulations and PESQ Measures for the Prediction of Speech Intelligibility in Sensorineural Hearing Loss

A novel approach based on the use of acoustic simulations of impaired perception and objective measures of perceptual speech quality (PESQ) is proposed and validated to predict speech intelligibility in sensorineural hearing loss. Acoustic simulations in impaired perception were obtained after degradation of the original, non distorted, speech waveforms by spectral smearing, expansive nonlinearity, and level scaling. PESQ was used to measure perceptual quality of the acoustic simulations obtained by varying the degree of the simulated hearing loss. PESQ scores were transformed into a predicted intelligibility scores using a logistic function. A set of CV and VC syllables in /a/, /u/, and /i/ contexts was used as reference test material. Subjective measures of intelligibility of the degraded speech were obtained in a group of 10 subjects and were compared to speech intelligibility predicted by the proposed approach. Overall, prediction of experimental speech intelligibility through the transformed PESQ measures was good (R2=0.7; RMSE=0.14) revealing that the proposed approach is a valuable aid in real clinical applications.