Main issues and objectives Context The main complaint of adults with hearing loss is difficulty understanding speech in noise. Restoring intelligibility in noise for the elderly is now a public health issue, due to the increase in social isolation, depression and dementia among patients without hearing aids. Hearing aids currently play a beneficial role in preventing cognitive over-decline, but one
Context Intelligibility can be defined as an analytical, acoustic-phonetic decoding notion – i.e. addressing “low-level” linguistic units –, referring to the quality of pronunciation at the segmental (phoneme and syllable) levels. Speech intelligibility is usually assessed using perceptual tasks. While these are informative, they entail several drawbacks, as they rely on subjective ratings, biased, among other factors, by the familiarity