Unaided and Aided Speech Intelligibility in a Real and Virtual Acoustic Environment

Area of Science:

• Audiology
• Acoustics
• Hearing Science

Background:

• Standard audiological tests may not reflect real-world hearing aid effectiveness.
• Everyday listening involves complex acoustic environments with reflections and multiple sound sources.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate speech recognition thresholds (SRTs) in a realistic simulated living room environment.
• To compare hearing aid benefit in simulated versus standard audiological spatial configurations.
• To evaluate the feasibility of virtual acoustics for assessing hearing aid performance.

Main Methods:

• Speech recognition thresholds were measured using a sentence test in a simulated German living room with an adjacent kitchen.
• Acoustic simulations were created using 86 and 4 loudspeaker arrays.
• Measurements included normal-hearing and hearing-impaired listeners, with and without hearing aids, under various spatial configurations.

Main Results:

• SRTs in the simulated environment closely matched the real environment for both aided and unaided listeners.
• Virtual acoustics (86 and 4 loudspeakers) effectively represented real-world listening conditions.
• Normalized signal-to-noise ratios showed no significant difference in hearing aid benefit between standard (S0N90) and simulated environments.

Conclusions:

• Virtual acoustics can accurately model real-world listening environments for audiological assessments.
• The hearing aid benefit measured in simulated complex environments is comparable to that in standard audiological settings.
• This approach offers a promising method for more ecologically valid hearing aid evaluations.