Abstract
Cubick and Dau (2016) showed that speech reception thresholds (SRTs) in noise, obtained with normal-hearing (NH) listeners, can be significantly higher with hearing aids (HAs) than in the corresponding unaided condition. Some of the listeners reported a change in their spatial perception of the sounds due to the HA processing, with auditory images often being broader and closer to the listener or even internalized. The current study investigated whether worse speech intelligibility with HAs might be caused by a “shrunken” acoustic scene and thus a reduced ability to spatially separate the target speech from the interferers. SRTs were measured in normal-hearing listeners with or without “ideal” HAs (with broadband, linear, flat gain) in the presence of three interfering talkers or speech-shaped noises. The interferers were presented either at + /- 90 and 180 degrees azimuth or were colocated with the target sentence at 0 degrees. Consistent with the previous study, SRTs were found to be increased by 2-2.5 dB with HAs when the interferers were spatially separated, but only by 0.5-1 dB when they were colocated. This 1.5 dB difference indicates that at least some of the disruption to speech intelligibility caused by HAs can potentially be attributed to degraded spatial separation.
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