Habicht, Julia and Kollmeier, Birger and Neher, Tobias (2016) Are experienced hearing aid ssers faster at grasping the meaning of a sentence than inexperienced ssers? An eye-tracking study. Trends in hearing, 20. ISSN 2331-2165

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Abstract

This study assessed the effects of hearing aid (HA) experience on how quickly a participant can grasp the meaning of an acoustic sentence-in-noise stimulus presented together with two similar pictures that either correctly (target) or incorrectly (competitor) depict the meaning conveyed by the sentence. Using an eye tracker, the time taken by the participant to start fixating the target (the processing time) was measured for two levels of linguistic complexity (low vs. high) and three HA conditions: clinical linear amplification (National Acoustic Laboratories-Revised), single-microphone noise reduction with National Acoustic Laboratories-Revised, and linear amplification ensuring a sensation level of ≥ 15 dB up to at least 4 kHz for the speech material used here. Timed button presses to the target stimuli after the end of the sentences (offline reaction times) were also collected. Groups of experienced (eHA) and inexperienced (iHA) HA users matched in terms of age, hearing loss, and working memory capacity took part (N = 15 each). For the offline reaction times, no effects were found. In contrast, processing times increased with linguistic complexity. Furthermore, for all HA conditions, processing times were longer (poorer) for the iHA group than for the eHA group, despite comparable speech recognition performance. Taken together, these results indicate that processing times are more sensitive to speech processing-related factors than offline reaction times. Furthermore, they support the idea that HA experience positively impacts the ability to process noisy speech quickly, irrespective of the precise gain characteristics.

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information:	Publiziert mit Hilfe des DFG-geförderten Open Access-Publikationsfonds der Carl von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg.
Uncontrolled Keywords:	hearing aids, speech comprehension, eye-tracking, acclimatization, linguistic complexity
Subjects:	Science and mathematics > Physics Technology, medicine, applied sciences Technology, medicine, applied sciences > Medicine and health
Divisions:	Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences > Department of Medical Physics and Acoustics
Date Deposited:	19 Sep 2017 12:44
Last Modified:	09 Jan 2018 11:56
URI:	https://oops.uni-oldenburg.de/id/eprint/3257
URN:	urn:nbn:de:gbv:715-oops-33383
DOI:	10.1177/2331216516660966
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