Sound in context: Comprehension of auditory scenes by listeners with normal and impaired hearing

Abstract

Sounds of everyday environments are rarely heard in isolation. Usually, they occur in the context of complex auditory scenes, where they are preceded and followed by other sounds or overlap with other sounds in time. In contrast, behavioral tests of auditory function are typically focused on isolated and often artificially constructed sounds which do not represent real world objects and events or the context in which they occur. Thus, results of such tests may have limited generalizability to important aspects of everyday listening. This presentation will review alternative approaches that focus on comprehension of auditory scenes and require integration of semantic information across multiple sounds. For listeners with hearing loss, our results suggest that comprehension of auditory scenes constitutes an important aspect of auditory assessment which, combined with findings from more traditional auditory tests, can provide a basis for auditory rehabilitation.