Date of Award
12-1981
Degree Name
Master of Arts
Department
Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences
First Advisor
Dr. Gary Lawson
Second Advisor
Dr. Hal Bate
Third Advisor
Dr. John Hanley
Access Setting
Masters Thesis-Open Access
Abstract
The purpose of the study was to identify within-group and between-group differences in perceived quality and perceived intelligibility of degraded speech for listeners with normal and impaired hearing. Following a visual magnitude estimation task, 10 subjects with normal hearing and 10 subjects with sensory-neural hearing impairment listened to connected speech samples degraded by seven levels of harmonic distortion and estimated the magnitude of their quality and intelligibility. Log average quality estimates and log average intelligibility estimates varied linearly with log degradation values for each group. The slopes of the log-log functions were interpreted as measures of perceptual sensitivity. Slopes for each listening task varied considerably within each listener group. Differences among the slopes were not statistically significant as a function of groups, tasks, or interaction of groups and tasks. The results were compared with those of related studies and implications for future research were presented.
Recommended Citation
Smith, Theresa, "Magnitude Estimation of the Quality and Intelligibility of Degraded Speech" (1981). Masters Theses. 1798.
https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/masters_theses/1798