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Updated: Nov 7, 2025

Systematic Hearing Performance Evaluation Process for Adolescents with Cochlear Implantation at Early Ages
Published on: March 24, 2023
A comparison of speech intelligibility and subjective quality with hearing-aid processing in older adults with
Kathryn H Arehart1, Song Hui Chon2, Emily M H Lundberg1
1SLHS Department, University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, CO, USA.
Objective:
This study characterised the relationship between speech intelligibility and quality in listeners with hearing loss for a range of hearing-aid processing settings and acoustic conditions.
Design:
Binaural speech intelligibility scores and quality ratings were measured for sentences presented in babble noise and processed through a hearing-aid simulation. The intelligibility-quality relationship was investigated by (1) assessing the effects of experimental conditions on each task; (2) directly comparing intelligibility scores and quality ratings for each participant across the range of conditions; and (3) comparing the association between signal envelope fidelity (represented by a cepstral correlation metric) and intelligibility and quality.
Study Sample:
Participants were 15 adults (7 females; age range 59-81 years) with mild to moderately severe sensorineural hearing loss.
Results:
Intelligibility and quality showed a positive association both with each other and with changes to signal fidelity introduced by the entire acoustic and signal-processing system including the additive noise and the hearing-aid output. As signal fidelity decreased, quality ratings changed at a slower rate than intelligibility scores. Individual psychometric functions were more variable for quality compared to intelligibility.
Conclusions:
Variability in the intelligibility-quality relationship reinforces the importance of measuring both intelligibility and quality in clinical hearing-aid fittings.
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