Directional benefit in the presence of speech and speechlike maskers

Recent research suggests that omnidirectional hearing aids are relatively ineffective at improving speech understanding in everyday conversational speech settings when the background noise contains both energetic and informational masking components. Energetic masking refers to situations where the peripheral (or neural) activity of the target is less than that of the masker, thus making the target inaudible. In contrast, informational masking effects, in this paper, refer to additional masking effects that are not energetic in nature. The current study evaluated the benefits of directional technology in the presence of background noises that contained both energetic and informational masking components. Aided speech recognition (in both omnidirectional and directional modes) was assessed in the presence of three types of maskers (forward and reversed speech and speech-modulated noise) that varied in the amount of informational masking they were expected to produce. Study results showed significant directional benefit in all conditions. This finding suggests that in everyday conversational speech environments, directional technology is equally efficacious regardless of the magnitude of informational masking present in the background noise. In addition, study findings suggest that the semantic information present in the masking speech may play only a limited role in contributing to informational masking in everyday environments.