1 Medizinische Physik and Cluster of Excellence "Hearing4all", Oldenburg University, Germany.
2 HörTech gGmbH, Oldenburg, Germany.
Trends Hear. 2018 Jan-Dec;22:2331216518779719. doi: 10.1177/2331216518779719.
Hearing-impaired listeners are known to have difficulties not only with understanding speech in noise but also with judging source distance and movement, and these deficits are related to perceived handicap. It is possible that the perception of spatially dynamic sounds can be improved with hearing aids (HAs), but so far this has not been investigated. In a previous study, older hearing-impaired listeners showed poorer detectability for virtual left-right (angular) and near-far (radial) source movements due to lateral interfering sounds and reverberation, respectively. In the current study, potential ways of improving these deficits with HAs were explored. Using stimuli very similar to before, detailed acoustic analyses were carried out to examine the influence of different HA algorithms for suppressing noise and reverberation on the acoustic cues previously shown to be associated with source movement detectability. For an algorithm that combined unilateral directional microphones with binaural coherence-based noise reduction and for a bilateral beamformer with binaural cue preservation, movement-induced changes in spectral coloration, signal-to-noise ratio, and direct-to-reverberant energy ratio were greater compared with no HA processing. To evaluate these two algorithms perceptually, aided measurements of angular and radial source movement detectability were performed with 20 older hearing-impaired listeners. The analyses showed that, in the presence of concurrent interfering sounds and reverberation, the bilateral beamformer could restore source movement detectability in both spatial dimensions, whereas the other algorithm only improved detectability in the near-far dimension. Together, these results provide a basis for improving the detectability of spatially dynamic sounds with HAs.
听力障碍者不仅在噪声环境中理解言语存在困难，而且在判断声源距离和运动方向时也存在困难，这些缺陷与感知障碍有关。使用助听器 (HA) 可能改善对空间动态声音的感知，但到目前为止，这一点尚未得到研究。在之前的研究中，由于侧向干扰声和混响，老年听力障碍者对虚拟的左右（角度）和远近（径向）声源运动的可检测性较差。在当前的研究中，探索了使用 HA 改善这些缺陷的潜在方法。使用与之前非常相似的刺激，进行了详细的声学分析，以检查不同的 HA 算法对噪声和混响抑制的影响，这些算法先前被证明与声源运动可检测性相关。与没有 HA 处理相比，组合使用单边定向麦克风和基于双耳相干性的降噪的算法以及具有双耳线索保留的双边波束形成器，在运动引起的频谱着色、信噪比和直达混响能量比方面的变化更大。为了从感知角度评估这两种算法，对 20 名老年听力障碍者进行了辅助的角度和径向声源运动可检测性测量。分析表明，在存在并发干扰声和混响的情况下，双边波束形成器可以恢复两个空间维度的声源运动可检测性，而另一种算法仅改善了近-远维度的可检测性。总之，这些结果为使用 HA 提高空间动态声音的可检测性提供了依据。
