Effect of Reverberation on Speech Identification Using Digital Hearing Aids

Abstract

The major consequence of sensory-neural hearing loss is communicative difficulty; particularly in noisy and reverberant listening environments. The acoustical variables that affect the perception of speech include level of background noise, reverberation time (RT), distance from the speaker to the listener and the interaction among these variables. The aim of the study was to compare the speech identification scores using reverberated and non-reverberated speech stimuli and to compare them between analog and digital hearing aid with Echo stop feature. The speech stimuli were reverberated in three different RTs such as 0.6secs (RI), l.2secs (R2) and 2secs (R3). Twenty normal hearing individuals and twenty hearing impaired subjects were selected in the age range of 40-70years. Moderate to moderately severe sensory-neural hearing loss subjects were participated in the hearing impaired group. The results suggest that in subjects with hearing impairment the better scores were obtained with digital hearing aid (with Echostop feature) than with the analog hearing aids across conditions i.e., in non-reverberant and reverberant conditions. Also the normal hearing individuals got the better scores in three reverberant conditions and in non-reverberant conditions. So it can be concluded from the study that in adults with sensorineural hearing loss, the use of a digital hearing aid (with Echostop feature) in reverberant conditions will help in better speech identification than with a analog hearing aid.