Abstract
Objective: To investigate the effect of sensitivity to temporal fine structure (TFS) on subjective measures of hearing aid outcome.Design: Prior to receiving hearing aids, participants completed a test to assess sensitivity to TFS and two self-assessment questionnaires; the Glasgow Hearing Aid Benefit Profile (GHABP), and the Speech, Spatial and Qualities of hearing (SSQ-A). Follow-up appointments, comprised three self-assessment questionnaires; the GHABP, the SSQ-B, and the International Outcome Inventory for Hearing Aid Outcomes (IOI-HA).Study sample: 75 adults were recruited from direct referral clinics.Results: Two thirds of participants were found to have good sensitivity to TFS; listeners with good sensitivity to TFS rated their hearing abilities higher at pre-fitting (SSQ-A) than those with poor sensitivity to TFS. At follow-up, participants with good sensitivity to TFS showed a smaller improvement on SSQ-B over listeners with poor sensitivity to TFS. Among the questionnaires, only the SSQ showed greater sensitivity to measure subjective differences between listeners with good and poor sensitivity to TFS.Conclusions: The clinical identification of a patient's ability to process TFS information at an early stage in the treatment pathway could prove useful in managing expectations about hearing aid outcomes.
Highlights
Presbycusis is characterized by gently-sloping high-frequency hearing loss
We found that sensitivity to temporal fine structure (TFS) information appeared to contribute to the degree of difficulty these participants reported experiencing on self-report questionnaires prior to the fitting of their hearing aids
We describe how age and hearing loss related to the self-reported assessments of hearing difficulty measured on the Glasgow Hearing Aid Benefit Profile (GHABP) and SSQ-A
Summary
It is often first revealed to the listener through a reduced understanding of conversational speech, when there is a source of background noise. Hearing aids make understanding speech much easier for the vast majority of people in a range of situations. When competing sound sources are spatially separated, spatial hearing plays an important role for speech intelligibility. Previous research showed that spatial hearing is mediated by various types of binaural acoustic cues: interaural time differences (ITDs), which, for on-going tones, translate to interaural phase differences (IPDs), interaural level differences (ILDs), and monaural spectral cues (see Blauert, 1983 for a review). ITDs arise as a result of the physical separation of a listener’s ears and provide information about the left-right position of a sound source. IPDs provide an accepted metric for neural synchrony and sensitivity to temporal fine structure (TFS)
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