Hearing aid evaluation using psychoacoustical proximity between Japanese monosyllables.

Abstract

To facilitate hearing aid selection, a new method was developed to assess the qualitative changes in speech perception with and without a hearing aid. This method utilizes maps of the Japanese monosyllables where the degrees of confusion are represented by distances between the monosyllables. On these maps, perceptual failures of the monosyllables can be simply analyzed by connecting confused stimuli and the corresponding wrong responses. The qualitative characteristics of monosyllable confusion for 53 patients with hearing impairment were comparatively analyzed with and without hearing aids. Results show that this method is useful for describing the qualitative effects of hearing aids on speech perception, and that it thus provides important information for hearing aid selection.