Listeners with hearing loss report difficulty understanding speech in the presence of background talkers (the “cocktail party problem”) even while wearing hearing aids. In this listening situation, a listener must be able to focus on the target talker using cues related to the talker’s voice and spatial location. Hearing aids provide necessary amplification for listeners with hearing loss, but they can also disrupt sound localization, which may counteract the positive effects and impact speech recognition in spatialized speech mixtures. To investigate this possibility, we conducted a study in which normally hearing listeners performed two tasks with and without hearing aids. In one task, listeners localized individual words presented from loudspeakers. In another task, a five-talker mixture was presented and listeners identified words spoken by a target talker at a specified location. We observed striking individual variations in the degree of disruption in localization accuracy with hearing aids, which were associated with reductions in word identification accuracy. The results highlight that there are listener-specific effects of hearing aids on spatial perception that may impact speech understanding in cocktail party environments, although additional work is needed to evaluate these effects in listeners with hearing loss. [Work supported by NIH NIDCD R01DC015760.]
Elin Roverud, Virginia Best· Journal of the Acoustical So...· 0 citations
OBJECTIVES
A recent study found that hearing aids fitted with highly occluding domes had an impact on the perception of externally presented speech, producing sound images that were perceived as too close or even inside the head. The present study examined whether this phenomenon is related to the well-known occlusion effect, which describes changes in ear canal levels and perceived own-voice quality during speaking.
DESIGN
Participants were 10 young adults with normal hearing and 10 young adults with sensorineural hearing loss. All participants were fitted with both closed- and open-fit hearing aids, and hearing aid users were also tested with their own devices. Externalization was measured using a numerical scale from 0 (inside the head) to 10 (at the loudspeaker). Participants also rated the naturalness of their own voice while speaking using a subjective scale from 1 (most unnatural) to 10 (most natural). Occlusion was also measured objectively for open and closed fittings using real ear measurements.
RESULTS
Externalization ratings were significantly higher for unaided than aided listening and for open versus closed domes. Similarly, own-voice ratings tended to be higher for unaided versus aided listening and for open versus closed domes. Although these broad patterns suggest that reduced ratings are associated with more occlusion, objective measures of occlusion did not account for a significant amount of the variance in either kind of rating. Similarly, individual own-voice ratings did not significantly predict individual externalization ratings. The data obtained with hearing aid users wearing their own devices suggested that regularly worn devices can have positive effects on own-voice perception while disrupting externalization.
CONCLUSIONS
Overall, compared with unaided listening, hearing aids negatively affected externalization and own-voice perception, with larger effects for closed than open fittings. However, at the individual level, measures of occlusion and sound externalization were not strongly related.
Pınar Ertürk, Virginia Best· Ear and Hearing· 0 citations
While hearing aids are critical for providing audibility and supporting speech intelligibility, they can have negative effects on spatial perception. Currently, the range of available styles of hearing aids is rapidly expanding with the introduction of over-the-counter devices (OTCs), but little is known about their effects on spatial perception. Importantly, these devices are aimed at listeners with relatively mild hearing losses, who may be especially sensitive to spatial distortions. Our broad goal is to comprehensively characterize spatial perception with different OTCs, considering azimuth identification, front-back discrimination, and sound externalization. In an initial study, twelve adult listeners with normal hearing were bilaterally fitted with OTCs representing different form factors: behind-the-ear (BTE; Lexie B2 Plus with open and closed domes), completely-in-canal (CIC; Eargo SE), and earbuds (Apple Pro 2). Each listener completed the different spatial tasks while wearing each set of devices, with unaided performance as a reference. While the mean results revealed disruptive effects of each OTC for all tasks, the size of the effect depended strongly on the device and on the individual listener. A follow-up study is expanding the set of OTCs, including listeners with mild-to-moderate hearing loss, and supplementing the behavioral results with acoustical analyses of ear-canal signals.
Pınar Ertürk, Virginia Best· Journal of the Acoustical So...· 0 citations
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