Microscopic modeling of hearing impaired listeners speech recognition using a physiologic auditory model

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Degraded speech intelligibility is one of the most frequent complaints of sensorineural hearing-impaired listeners (the most common form of hearing impairment) in noisy situations. The aim of this project is to gain a better understanding of the impact of different types of sensorineural hearing impairment on human speech recognition. The knowledge obtained will be beneficial for the design of new hearing aids. I intend to use a computational modeling approach to model the speech recognition of hearing-impaired listeners in order to understand this problem. Mixtures of speech and noise will be processed by a model of the auditory periphery, which supplies the input to an automatic speech recognition (ASR) system. This approach can be termed a microscopic speech recognition model, because it operates on digitized time-domain signals (rather than operating on long-term spectra). This simulates the processing that takes place in the human auditory system. Furthermore, I intend to model the recognition of single phonemes rather than whole sentences. The proposed experiments will replace the previously in my dissertation used auditory model with a model that mimics individual physiological stages in the auditory system much more closely. Hitherto, human auditory processing was only modeled in an "effective" (phenomenological) way. The new, more physiological auditory model, developed at the University of Essex, reproduces auditory nerve firing patterns, i.e. those patterns that the central nervous system has access to.The choice of Essex for this research will allow me to do additional speech recognition experiments with hearing-impaired listeners, for whom a very precise diagnosis of their hearing has already been generated using recently developed new techniques. A second advantage of this location is a close cooperation with the „Speech and Hearing“ group at the University of Sheffield (worldwide leading in ASR research).