Increasing speech intelligibility in monaural hearing by adding noise at the other ear

Abstract Ambient environment noise can affect speech intelligibility in phone communication. This paper investigates the feasibility of increasing speech intelligibility in monaural hearing by adding noise at the other ear. The testing materials were generated by mixing the speech from the English Coordinate Response Measure corpus with three types of environmental noise, where 4 signals to noise ratios in the speech ear and 14 noise levels in the contralateral ear were included. The experimental results show that a proper level of contralateral noise can improve the speech intelligibility when the signal to noise ratio in the speech ear is lower than a certain level, but a large contralateral noise level has the opposite effect. A preliminary explanation for the phenomena is attempted by using a binaural loudness model and some psychoacoustic and physiological facts.

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