Impact of hearing impairment on fricative intelligibility for artificially bandwidth-extended telephone speech in noise

Because of its limited bandwidth, telephone speech is poorly intelligible. Artificial bandwidth extension (ABWE) reconstructs themissing frequencies aiming at, e.g., higher intelligibility. It was recently demonstrated that hearing-impaired persons wearing a hearing aid benefit from ABWE-enhanced telephone speech. However, it is unclear, whether persons without hearing impairment also take profit from ABWE in the same test conditions and if so, to what extent. This paper presents a subjective listening test with normal-hearing subjects based on meaningless German syllables simulating narrowband (NB), ABWE-enhanced and wideband (WB) telephone speech in two noisy listening conditions. The test results reveal a clear impact of hearing impairment on the ABWE capability to improve telephone intelligibility. For a signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of 0 dB, subjects with and without hearing impairment similarly benefit from ABWE. At 20 dB SNR, hearing-impaired subjects take even more profit in contrast to normal-hearing subjects.