The perception of spoken Norwegian in noise by hearing-impaired and normal-hearing listeners

The goal of this study was to make an inventory of the problems hearing-impaired people encounter when trying to understand spoken Norwegian under noisy conditions. To accommodate subjects with varying degrees of hearing loss a listening test comprising three different formats involving different degrees of demand was designed. The speech material used consisted of semantically unpredictable sentences spoken by male and female speakers with different dialectal backgrounds. The speech signal was deteriorated by reverberation and babbling noise. Three different groups of subjects participated in the listening tests: hearing-impaired older listeners, a reference group consisting of older listeners, and a reference group of normal-hearing younger listeners. The paper presents some main results from the listening tests, drawing conclusions concerning, among other things, the influence of speaker gender, speaker and listener dialect, and word position. In addition, vowel and consonant confusions are discussed.