The cocktail party phenomenon A review of research on speech intelligibility in multiple-talker conditions

It is in most cases relatively easy to understand one talker even if other persons arc talking at the same time. Over the last decades, this so-called cocktail party phenomenon has been the subject of a considerable number of studies. In the present paper, an overview is given of part of this research, specifically those studies dealing with the...

Ons oor en het geluid om ons heen: vragen en antwoorden op een rij gezet door TNO

The negative effect of amplitude compression in multichannel hearing aids in the light of the modulation transfer funtion

The article deals with the question of why multichannel amplitude compression appears to have a negative rather than a positive effect no speech intelligibility by hearing-impaired listeners. It is argued that the small time constants of amplitude compression diminish the temporal as well as the spectral contrasts in the speech signal. According...