Second Biennial Hearing Aid Research and Development Conference

September 22-24, 1997
National Institutes of Health
Bethesda, Maryland

Components of Hearing Aid Benefit Over Time

Recently, a study was conducted to determine whether benefit derived from hearing aid use increases with hearing aid experience (Horwitz & Turner, 1997). Two measures of hearing aid benefit were employed: an objective syllable recognition task and a subjective questionnaire. In the initial analyses, only gross measures were examined, such as the overall percent correct recognition of nonsense syllables and overall self-assessed frequency of problems with speech recognition. Both measures of aided speech recognition increased significantly over the first 18 weeks of hearing aid use for a group of 13 new hearing aid users. Here, the focus is on more subtle aspects of hearing aid benefit suggested by both outcome measures. In these analyses, benefit provided by a hearing aid is assessed in three ways: (1) differences in the patterns of correct and incorrect responses to nonsense syllables with and without a hearing aid, (2) changes in the patterns of responses to nonsense syllables with a hearing aid over time, and (3) changes in patterns of self-assessed frequency of problems with a hearing aid over time. For example, as expected, place-of-articulation errors are most common, and account for a large proportion of the variance in overall score. Over the course of the initial 14 - 18 weeks of hearing aid use, however, there is a statistically significant reduction in place errors. Manner-of articulation errors are less common but also tend to decrease with hearing aid use. Voicing errors are rare even without a hearing aid. Such detailed analyses, beyond overall scores, may provide additional useful information to evaluate hearing aid benefit.

[Work supported by NIDCD]

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