Speech Perception in High-Frequency Sloping Hearing Loss Under Different Aided Conditions: Single Case Study

Hearing loss usually slopes towards the high-frequency regions of hearing in the elderly population. We assessed the speech perception performance in an elderly patient with high-frequency sloping hearing loss under different aided conditions as a function of speech stimuli and listening conditions. The participant was a 69-year-old male with symmetrical and post-lingually acquired bilateral high-frequency sloping sensorineural hearing loss. Speech recognition score testing was conducted under conventional and nonlinear frequency compression (NFC) settings of the hearing aids using conventional and high-frequency wordlists in quiet and + 5 dB SNR listening conditions. The participant outperformed speech perception for conventional wordlists compared to high-frequency wordlists in the conventional setting. Similarly, the participant outperformed speech perception for high-frequency wordlists in the NFC setting compared to the conventional setting. Finally, the participant underperformed speech perception in the noisy compared to quiet listening conditions, irrespective of hearing aid settings and wordlists. The conventional wordlists overestimated the performance of the conventional setting for speech perception. Other than evaluating the actual performance of the conventional setting, the high-frequency wordlists estimated some of the benefits of the NFC setting over the conventional setting for speech perception.