Develop an objective measure mechanism to analyze speech discrimination of sensorineural hearing loss

Speech perception is crucial for users using hearing aids. The performance of hearing aids is degraded with respect to the sensorineural hearing loss. This factor leads to decrease the speech discrimination in syllable or phoneme recognition. In the clinical protocol., pure tone audiometry (PTA) and speech reception threshold (SRT) is :adopted to assess the hearing loss. The clinician subjectively utilizes this information to fit the hearing aids. But, this approach is hard to perform a lot various kinds of experiments, and even worse, their responses are not reliable from time to time. In this paper, a novel objective assessment mechanism was proposed to explore the effect of speech discrimination. A robust continuous phoneme recognizer and a statistical testing method were developed to provide more quantitative and objective information. This study makes benefits for the design and fitting of hearing aids.