Abstract
The goal of this study is to quantify a given hearing aid insertion gain using a consonant recognition based measure, for ears having sensorineural hearing loss. The basic question addressed is how a treatment impacts phone recognition, relative to a normal-hearing insertion gain. These tests are directed at (1) fine-tuning a treatment, with the ultimate goal of improving speech perception, and (2) to identify when a hearing level based treatment degrades speech recognition. Eight subjects with hearing loss were tested under two conditions: Flat-gain and a Treatment insertion gain based on subject's hearing level. The speech corpus consisted of consonant-vowel tokens at different signal to speech-weighted noise (SNR) conditions, presented at subjects’ most comfortable level. The tokens used in this study were selected from those having less than 3% error at -2 [dB] SNR, from 30 Normal Hearing subjects. The Treatment caused token score to improve for 31% of the trials and decrease for 12%. An analysis method was devised to identify degraded tokens for individual hearing impaired ears, based on sorting the tokens according to their error. By comparing sorted errors across experiments, the effect of the treatment could be accurately evaluated, providing precise characterization of idiosyncratic phone recognition.
Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
