This study compared preferred volume setting for linear peak clipping, compression limiting, and wide dynamic range compression (WDRC) amplification and quantified speech audibility at the preferred volume setting for each amplification type. Ten listeners with mild-to-moderate hearing loss were fitted monaurally with a behind-the-ear hearing aid programmed sequentially with WDRC, compression l...

This paper reports the aided and unaided speech-recognition scores from a group of 171 elderly hearing-aid wearers. All hearing-aid wearers were fit with identical instruments (linear Class-D amplifiers with output-limiting compression) and evaluated with a standard protocol. In addition to including multiple measures of speech recognition, an extensive set of physiological and perceptual measu...

Hard-of-hearing musicians have long complained about the poor sound quality they experience while playing their instruments or when listening to music through hearing aids. Indeed, many non-musicians also complain of the reduced sound quality of music heard through their personal amplification. This article is a study of one electroacoustic parameter that, together with three other less importa...

Speech discrimination testing was carried out under clinical trial conditions for eight profoundly postlingually deaf adults to assess the efficacy of a newly developed 22-channel cochlear prosthesis and speech processor. Three months postoperatively, these patients showed significantly better results with the cochlear prosthesis than for preoperative testing with a conventional hearing aid or ...

This paper describes the relation between the region defined by the first and second formant frequencies and those peak levels in order to design a compression type of hearing aid. The experiments are conducted with the normal hearing subjects whose hearing areas are restricted by increasing HTL with masking noise. We present the synthetic speech signal with two resonant components to examine h...

INTRODUCTION Neural encoding of speech begins with the analysis of the signal as a whole broken down into its sinusoidal components in the cochlea, which has to be conserved up to the higher auditory centers. Some of these components target the dead regions of the cochlea causing little or no excitation. Measuring aided speech-evoked auditory brainstem response elicited by speech stimuli with d...

The basic goal of amplification is to provide audibility for speech without making sounds uncomfortably loud. These requirements must be followed with special care with pediatric patients to ensure they have the opportunity to develop their speech, language, and auditory skills to their full potential. This is because young children have more difficulty filling in missing information than do ol...

Acceptable noise level (ANL) measures a listener's reaction to background noise while listening to speech. Relations among hearing aid use and ANL, speech in noise (SPIN) scores, and listener characteristics (age, gender, pure-tone average) were investigated in 191 listeners with hearing impairment. Listeners were assigned to one of three groups based on patterns of hearing aid use: full-time u...