Abstract
The purposes of this study are to investigate the neural representation of a speech stimulus in the auditory system of individuals with normal hearing (NH) and those with hearing aids (HAs) and to explore the impact of noise reduction algorithms (NR) on auditory brainstem response to complex sounds (cABR). Twenty NH individuals and 28 HA users completed puretone audiometry, the Korean version of the Hearing in Noise Test (K-HINT), and cABR. In 0 and +5 dB signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs), the NH group was tested in /da/ only (quiet) and /da/ with white noise (WN) conditions while the HA group was tested in /da/ only, /da/ WN, /da/ WN NR ON, and /da/ WN NR OFF conditions. Significant differences were observed between /da/ only and /da/ WN conditions for F0 in both groups, but no SNR effect was observed for both groups. Findings of this study are consistent with previous literature that diminished cABR amplitudes indicate reduced representation of sounds in the auditory system. This is the first to examine the effect of a specific HA feature on cABR responses.
Highlights
The purposes of this study are to investigate the neural representation of a speech stimulus in the auditory system of individuals with normal hearing (NH) and those with hearing aids (HAs) and to explore the impact of noise reduction algorithms (NR) on auditory brainstem response to complex sounds
The results revealed that there was no significant correlation between the cABR fundamental frequency amplitude of F0 amplitude in /da/ only and K-Hearing in Noise Test (HINT) performance in quiet (p-value=0.533, Rho=0.15)
Ever since 1996, when digital signal processing was introduced for the first time[39], hearing technology has advanced over the years to aid HA users in understanding speech in noise better than they were able to before
Summary
The purposes of this study are to investigate the neural representation of a speech stimulus in the auditory system of individuals with normal hearing (NH) and those with hearing aids (HAs) and to explore the impact of noise reduction algorithms (NR) on auditory brainstem response to complex sounds (cABR). Participants reported through self-reports that they felt more satisfied when they were able to use the features[10] Another issue for speech intelligibility is disparity between HA performance in clinical or laboratory environments and in the real-world, which has been noted in several studies[11,12,13,14]. The real world is much noisier and visual cues, such as lip movements, are provided simultaneously to potentially improve communication Due to this mismatch, an accurate evaluation of the effectiveness of HA features is challenging and the efforts to create a laboratory environment that better reflects real world listening situations are ongoing[15]. For NR, some studies examined its effectiveness objectively using pupillometry[16,17,18], but research into the effect of NR using auditory brainstem response to complex sounds (cABR) has not been conducted yet
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