Starkey Hearing Research Center, 2150 Shattuck Avenue, Suite 408, Berkeley, California 94704, USA.
Department of Psychology, University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley, California 94530, USA.
J Acoust Soc Am. 2017 Oct;142(4):2386. doi: 10.1121/1.5008498.
To better understand issues of hearing-aid benefit during natural listening, this study examined the added demand placed by the goal of understanding speech over the more typically studied goal of simply recognizing speech sounds. The study compared hearing-aid benefit in two conditions, and examined factors that might account for the observed benefits. In the phonetic condition, listeners needed only identify the correct sound to make a correct response. In the semantic condition, listeners had to understand what they had heard to respond correctly, because the answer did not include any keywords from the spoken speech. Hearing aids provided significant benefit for listeners in the phonetic condition. In the semantic condition on the other hand, there were large inter-individual differences, with many listeners not experiencing any benefit of aiding. Neither a set of cognitive and linguistic tests, nor age, could explain this variability. Furthermore, analysis of psychometric functions showed that enhancement of the target speech fidelity through improvement of signal-to-noise ratio had a larger impact on listeners' performance in the phonetic condition than in the semantic condition. These results demonstrate the importance of incorporating naturalistic elements in the simulation of multi-talker listening for assessing the benefits of intervention in communication success.
为了更好地理解自然聆听环境下助听器的增益效果，本研究考察了理解言语这一目标相较于单纯识别言语声音更为典型的目标所带来的额外需求。该研究在两种条件下比较了助听器的增益效果，并探讨了可能导致观察到的增益效果的因素。在语音条件下，听众只需识别正确的声音即可做出正确的反应。在语义条件下，听众必须理解他们所听到的内容才能做出正确的反应，因为答案不包含任何来自口语的关键词。助听器为语音条件下的听众提供了显著的增益效果。然而，在语义条件下，个体间差异较大，许多听众没有体验到助听的任何增益效果。认知和语言测试组以及年龄都无法解释这种可变性。此外，心理测量函数的分析表明，通过提高信噪比来增强目标语音的保真度，对听众在语音条件下的表现影响大于在语义条件下的表现。这些结果表明，在模拟多人聆听时纳入自然元素对于评估干预措施在沟通成功方面的益处非常重要。
