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Long-Term Effects of Hearing Aid Use on Auditory Spectral Discrimination and Temporal Envelope Sensitivity and Speech
Yong-Hwi An1, Eun Sub Lee1, Dong Hyun Kim1
1Department of Otorhinolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery, Nowon Eulji Medical Center, Eulji University, Seoul, Korea.
Background:
The aims of this study were to evaluate the long-term effects of hearing-aid use on auditory spectral discrimination, temporal envelope sensitivity, and speech perception ability and to determine whether hearing performance changes with the duration of hearing-aid use.
Methods:
The study included 13 elderly participants (64.15 ± 9.87 years) who had used hearing-aids for 12 months in everyday life. We compared the auditory performance without hearing-aids at the time of pre-fitting with the auditory performance with hearing-aids at 1 month and 12 months after fitting. Three different psychoacoustic measurements were made at their most comfortable levels to exclude the effect of amplification: (1) spectral-ripple discrimination, (2) temporal modulation detection, and (3) speech recognition in white noise.
Results:
Repeated-measures analysis of variance demonstrated that the duration of hearing-aid use significantly affected spectral-ripple discrimination thresholds and 100 Hz temporal modulation detection threshold (P < .05). Post hoc tests revealed that the improvements in spectral discrimination in the early post-fitting stage (1 month) did not seem to increase over the period of hearing-aid use, whereas the temporal envelope sensitivity improved continuously over time (up to 12 months).
Conclusion:
These results imply that hearing-aid users adapt to hearing-aid processing for spectral discrimination immediately, whereas they need time to adapt to hearing-aid processing for temporal envelope sensitivity. Alternatively, long-term hearing-aid use could induce positive plastic changes exclusively in terms of temporal envelope sensitivity.
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