Effects of hearing-aid use on measures of speech discrimination and listening effort were investigated in 23 hearing-impaired adults. Speech discrimination testing was conducted with and without hearing aid use. A probe reaction time task was performed simultaneously to assess the amount of listening effort devoted to the speech discrimination task. The results indicated that hearing aid use improved speech discrimination and reduced listening effort. The probe reaction time task may have potential as an objective measure of listening effort in hearing-impaired individuals.

This investigation employed measures of learning accuracy (performance) and learning ease (attention or psychological effort) to assess processing demands during auditory learning under degraded listening conditions. Learning accuracy was measured with a highly intelligible paired-associate learning task presented to 49 normal-hearing adults under different signal-to-competition ratios and signal presentation levels. Learning ease was assessed by a simultaneously presented probe reaction-time task. Final results indicated that (1) primary signal presentation level exerted no effect either on learning accuracy or ease, and (2) the introduction of competing speech into the listening environment exerted no effect on learning performance, but resulted in a significant increase in learning effort. These findings have important implications for listening conditions in educational settings, hearing aid selection, education of hearing-impaired and learning-disabled children, and future study of attentional demands during auditory processing.

Researchers describe Mandarin Chinese tone phonemes by their fundamental frequency (Fo) contours. However, tone phonemes are also comprised of higher harmonics that also may cue tone phonemes. We measured identification thresholds of acoustically filtered tone phonemes and found that higher harmonics, including resolved harmonics above the Fo and unresolved harmonics, cued tone phonemes. Resolved harmonics cued tone phonemes at lower intensity levels suggesting they are more practical tone-phoneme cues in everyday speech. The clear implication is that researchers should use the Fo only as a benchmark when describing tone-phoneme contours, recognizing that higher harmonics also cue tone phonemes. These results also help explain why tone-language speakers can identify tone phonemes over a telephone that attenuates selective frequencies, and suggests that hearing-impaired tone-language speakers may still identify tone phonemes when their hearing loss attenuates selective frequencies.

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