Objectively Measuring Audiovisual Effects in Noise Using Virtual Human Speakers

Abstract

Speech intelligibility in challenging listening environments relies on the integration of audiovisual cues. Measuring the effectiveness of audiovisual integration in these challenging listening environments can be difficult due to the complexity of such environments. The Audiovisual True-to-Life Assessment of Auditory Rehabilitation (AVATAR) is a paradigm that was developed to provide an ecological environment to capture both the audio and visual aspects of speech intelligibility measures. Previous research has shown the benefit from audiovisual cues can be measured using behavioral (e.g., word recognition) and electrophysiological (e.g., neural tracking) measures. The current research examines, when using the AVATAR paradigm, if electrophysiological measures of speech intelligibility yield similar outcomes as behavioral measures. We hypothesized visual cues would enhance both the behavioral and electrophysiological scores as the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of the speech signal decreased. Twenty young (18–25 years old) participants (1 male and 19 female) with normal hearing participated in our study. For our behavioral experiment, we administered lists of sentences using an adaptive procedure to estimate a speech reception threshold (SRT). For our electrophysiological experiment, we administered 35 lists of sentences randomized across five SNR levels (silence, 0, −3, −6, and −9 dB) and two visual conditions (audio-only and audiovisual). We used a neural tracking decoder to measure the reconstruction accuracies for each participant. We observed most participants had higher reconstruction accuracies for the audiovisual condition compared to the audio-only condition in conditions with moderate to high levels of noise. We found the electrophysiological measure may correlate with the behavioral measure that shows audiovisual benefit.