Evaluation of phoneme compression schemes designed to compensate for temporal and spectral masking in background noise.

The effect of phonemic compression has been studied on speech intelligibility in background noise in hearing-impaired listeners with moderate-to-severe high-frequency losses. One configuration, anti-upward-spread-of-masking (anti-USOM) focuses on a release from spectral masking of high-frequency speech cues by selective spectral tilting. Release from temporal masking is the main goal of a second configuration, high-pass filtered compression (HFC), which reduces the speech modulations within a high-pass filtered compression channel.

The effects of phonemic compression and anti-upward-spread-of-masking (anti-USOM) on the perception of articulatory features in hearing-impaired listeners.

The effect of speech processing on articulatory-feature recognition was studied in a group of hearing-impaired listeners with high-frequency sensorineural losses. Individual difference scaling (INDSCAL) and sequential information analysis (SINFA) were applied to a set of consonant-vowel-consonant responses measured under various conditions of speech processing. The processing consisted of high-frequency phonemic compression combined with compensation for anti-upward-spread-of-masking (i.