Spatial hearing in middle-aged and older adults with a hearing aid: Does noise type matter?

Abstract

Purpose: The present study aimed to identify the overall patterns of spatial hearing in a sample population of the geriatric population wearing a hearing aid in an actual clinical setting and to investigate while paying attention to aging and the effects of spatial separation on informational masking (IM) of target speech of common types of noise in everyday life.Methods: Nine participants (mean age: 68.9 ± 9.6) wearing hearing aids participated. The spatial hearing abilities of the participants were assessed by measuring their speech reception threshold (SRT) and spatial release from masking (SRM), using speech-like (SLN) and steady-state (SSN) noise-maskers.Results: The study results identified a trend in the decrease in SRT in all noise conditions with increasing azimuth angles. The larger the target/masker spatial separation, the larger the SRM became in all noise conditions. Results revealed that geriatric hearing-impaired participants experienced a comparable amount of SRM from IM in SLN concerning SSN.Conclusions: Given these findings, the spatial separation did not have the same effects on the IM of target speech by SLN in the geriatric population wearing a hearing aid as it did in the general hearing-impaired population at younger ages. It can be inferred from these findings that the extent to which informational maskers can compromise the spatial hearing abilities of geriatric hearing-impaired listeners may depend on their age and the severity of spatial hearing loss being imposed on them.