Benefits of wearing hearing aids in a natural complex auditory environment

Abstract

A simulation of multi-talker environments (Hafter et al., Basic Aspects of Hearing. 2013) asks subjects to process a continuous flow of information from spoken stories. Subjects respond manually to visually-presented questions that appear soon after occurrence of the relevant information in one of the stories. In the present study, hearing-impaired listeners either do or do not receive gain through their hearing aids, and special interest is in responses to questions based on phonetic cues vs. those which require semantic analysis of the acoustic signal. Our aim is to determine the benefit of receiving hearing-aid amplification, comparing the benefit observed for phonetically based questions to that observed with semantically-based questions, and in terms of individual linguistic and cognitive abilities as measured by frequently used tests for the purpose. Results showed a strong benefit of aided listening among subjects when the need is only to recognize speech but, large individual difference in aided benefits when the listener was required to understand the meaning of the speech, with auditory, linguistic and cognitive capabilities all being factors that determine successful understanding. The incorporation of naturalistic elements in the simulation of multi-talker listening is important for unearthing the large individual variability in communication success.