狭指向性マイクの補聴器への試用

Abstract

It is well known that reverberation interferes with speech discrimination, but it is not so well recognized that hearing aid users are more affected than normal people in reverberant environments, and that monaural hearing aids and sensorineural deafness further increase the difficulties. Five hard of hearing students in middle school were tested under the following conditions. Two of them were binaural hearing aid users and all had sensorineural deafness except one with mixed deafness. Twenty recorded short sentences were presented through a loudspeaker and the subjects were required to write down words or phrases even if they could not completely follow the meaning of each sentence, first with their own aids and then with the “telescope microphone”. The tests were performed once in the gymnasium with much reverberation and once in an ordinary class room. The test results were analysed in two ways: word and phrase discrimination and sentence discrimination. Analysis of the test results showed the advantages of the “telescope microphone” in reverberant environments.