Development of Japanese paralinguistic information transmission tests for assessment of hearing-assistance devices utilizing multi-speaker and emotional speech corpora

For assessment of hearing assistance devices, we developed speaker discrimination test and speaker emotion identification test. The materials of each test were derived from corpora: “Japanese phonetically balanced word speech database” and “Keio emotional speech database” respectively. The speaker discrimination test consists of ten words spoken by ten speakers. The words were selected considering familiarity, and the speakers were selected considering F0 and estimated VTL. The speaker emotion identification test includes nine words spoken with seven emotions. To evaluate the validity of both tests, a series of hearing experiments was conducted. The stimuli of the experiments consisted of each sound of the tests processed by a 1 to 32 channel cochlear implant simulator. The results showed that scores of both tests decreased according to degradation of the speech sounds. This result indicates the test score reflects the performance of hearing assistance devices and can be used to assess the devices.