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Assessing the efficacy of hearing-aid amplification using a phoneme test
Christoph Scheidiger1, Jont B Allen2, Torsten Dau1
1Hearing Systems Group, Department of Electrical Engineering, Technical University of Denmark, DK-2800 Lyngby, Denmark.
The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America
|April 5, 2017
Summary
Hearing-impaired listeners showed improved consonant-vowel perception with frequency-dependent hearing aid amplification. Novel measures can assess individual hearing aid impacts on speech intelligibility.
Area of Science:
- Audiology
- Speech Science
- Hearing Aid Technology
Background:
- Consonant-vowel (CV) perception is crucial for understanding speech processing in humans.
- Hearing impairment (HI) significantly affects speech perception, necessitating effective amplification strategies.
Purpose of the Study:
- To evaluate the effectiveness of two amplification schemes (flat-gain vs. frequency-dependent prescriptive gain) on CV identification in hearing-impaired listeners.
- To introduce novel measures for assessing individual responses to frequency-dependent amplification.
Main Methods:
- Two CV identification experiments were conducted with hearing-impaired listeners using 14 consonants and the vowel /ɑ/.
- Stimuli were presented in quiet and noise across varying signal-to-noise ratios (0, 6, 12 dB) under two amplification conditions.
- Novel entropy and angular distance measures were proposed to analyze consonant confusions.
Main Results:
- Frequency-dependent amplification resulted in lower average recognition error scores compared to flat-gain amplification.
- Despite improved average scores, primary consonant confusions often remained consistent across listeners.
- Individual effects of frequency-dependent gain on consonant confusions were observed.
Conclusions:
- Frequency-dependent amplification offers benefits for speech perception in hearing-impaired individuals.
- Proposed entropy and angular distance measures can quantify individual impacts of hearing aid processing.
- These measures, combined with phoneme speech tests, may help assess hearing aid effectiveness on speech intelligibility.