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Behavioral Assessment of Hearing in 2 to 4 Year-old Children: A Two-interval, Observer-based Procedure Using Conditioned Play-based Responses
Published on: January 23, 2017
Relationship between consonant recognition in noise and hearing threshold.
Yang-soo Yoon1, Jont B Allen, David M Gooler
1House Research Institute, Los Angeles, CA, USA. yyoon@hei.org
Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research : JSLHR
|December 27, 2011
Summary
Hearing-impaired listeners
Area of Science:
- Audiology
- Speech Perception
- Hearing Science
Background:
- Poorer speech understanding in noise is common in hearing-impaired (HI) individuals.
- Grouping HI listeners by audiometric hearing threshold (HT) is a common but potentially inaccurate practice.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the relationship between consonant recognition and audiometric hearing threshold (HT) across various signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs).
- To determine if HT predicts speech-in-noise performance in hearing-impaired listeners.
Main Methods:
- Generated confusion matrices (CMs) for 25 HI ears using 16 consonant-vowel syllables at 6 SNRs.
- Applied Individual Differences Scaling (INDSCAL) to feature-based matrices and CMs to analyze listener relationships with HT and consonant recognition.
Main Results:
- No direct predictive relationship was found between percent error (Pe) scores and HT across SNRs.
- Audiometric hearing threshold (HT) accounted for only 39% of the variance in the slopes of Pe.
- INDSCAL analysis did not show listener grouping based on HT, indicating it does not consistently explain consonant recognition patterns.
Conclusions:
- Audiometric hearing threshold (HT) does not significantly predict consonant recognition in noise for hearing-impaired listeners.
- Current grouping practices based on HT may not accurately reflect speech-in-noise abilities.
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