Purpose: The present study examines auditory training outcomes in terms of speech perception in noise, working memory, reasoning ability, and subjective hearing aid satisfaction. Methods: Ten older adults who wear hearing aids (mean age: 71.6) voluntarily participated in the study. For the training material, 78 sentence sets composed of 3 to 5 sentences were used. During the auditory training, participants tried to remember the order of sentences. Among the 78 sentence sets, 45 contained clues and the rest did not. Each participant underwent assessments including speech perception in noise and digit spans and reasoning test and completed a self-report hearing aid satisfaction questionnaire both pre- and post-auditory training. The participants completed eight sessions of the auditory training. Results: The results showed a statistically significant increase in speech recognition ability in noise, short-term memory, and working memory, as well as satisfaction with hearing aid use. Despite a slight increase on the reasoning test, there was no statistically significant improvement.Conclusion: The results of this study suggested that the auditory training in remembering the order of sentences improved speech perception in noise, sensory and working memory, and subjective satisfaction with hearing aids. Future research can investigate more effective auditory training tools to improve the various cognitive skills and communication ability of older adults who wear hearing aids.

Purpose: While adjusting the compression threshold (CT) of low and high frequency bands of multi-channel hearing aids in noise, we tried to evaluate any changes in Korean consonant-vowel (CV) syllabic recognition scores, sound quality, and loudness of noise with white noise.Methods: A total of twenty one subjects with hearing loss (mean age of 66.2 years) participated voluntarily. Their pure-tone average was 46.0 dB HL and the word recognition score was 72.1%. The CTs of low/high frequency bands were adjusted to 50/50 dB SPL, 50/65 dB SPL, 65/50 dB SPL and 60/65 dB SPL in multi-channel hearing aids. While presenting white noise to the non-test ear, Korean CV syllables were presented to the test ear to evaluate the recognition scores, clarity of conversational speech, and loudness of noise. The intensity of CV syllables presented to the subject was 50 dB HL, and the signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) were 5 dB and 10 dB.Results: First, when the CT of low/high frequency bands was adjusted to 50/50 dB SPL, the CV syllabic recognition scores were higher compared to 65/50 dB SPL. Second, in the noise environment, the clarity of conversational speech, and loudness of the noise did not have any difference regardless of levels of CT.Conclusion: Based on current findings, the frequency bands setting of CT in the multi-channel hearing aids might provide changes to recognize Korean speech sounds, which may affect the adjustment of frequency band CT from multichannel hearing aids in the future.