Speech intelligibility of hearing impaired participants in long-term training of bone-conducted ultrasonic hearing aid

Abstract

Bone-conducted ultrasonic hearing aid (BCUHA) system is the unique device to provide the auditory sensation to profoundly hearing-impaired persons without any surgical operations. To clarify effects of long-term hearing training with this device, two deaf participants engaged the BCUHA training for 9 months. They were trained to use BCUHA through repetition of sentences read aloud and free conversation, and then they took part in word recognition tests and monosyllabic identification tests. Both participants showed that they could recognize words above chance using auditory sensation only provided by BCUHA device if alternatives or context were presented to them during the trials. Besides, it was observed that monosyllabic intelligibility score with both of auditory and visual cue had much increased with the day of training than the score with auditory cue only and that with visual cue only. The result suggests that the long-term training with BCUHA achieves efficient integration of auditory and visual cue of speech such as cochlear implant users showed in previous studies.