The present study examined performance of 10 normal-hearing listeners (control group) and 10 cochlear implant (CI) users who had CI on one ear and HA on the opposite ear (CI+HA) in order to investigate the amount of binaural benefit on K-HINT (Korea-Hearing in Noise threshold) test. Additionally, a K-SSQ (SSQ translated in Korean) survey was also conducted to all CI participants in order to evaluate their subjective benefit from the use of CI+HA. Results of the K-HINT test for YNH and CI participants were as follows. For YHN listeners, -7.2 dB SNR, on average, was required to identify K-HINT sentences by 50%. For CI users, 15.32 dB SNR was needed for 50% of K-HINT sentence identification during CI-only listening condition whereas 11.82 dB SNR was required for 50% of K-HINT sentence identification during CI+HA listening condition. CI users' binaural benefits calculated from K-HINT results were 4.6 dB signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), 3.4 dB SNR, and 3.8 dB SNR for head shadow effect, binaural squelch, binaural summation effects, respectively. Results of K-SSQ survey suggested that the degree of satisfaction was around 62%, regardless of three sections (speech, spatial and quality) in K-SSQ. CI users recieved a significant benefit from binaural use (CI+HA), regardless of the direction of noise.

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A crossword puzzle is one of the common and familiar activities for adults. The purpose of this study was to develop crossword puzzles as a material of auditory training. In the puzzle, words were answers (target) to the puzzle, and all the target words were placed from left to right and from top to bottom in a crossword grid. As an auditory clue of puzzle, either sentence or a series of words was used to help figure out the answer. Based on pilot study, we selected 112 crossword puzzles, consisting of 503 answer-words (target) words, 503 sentence-hints, and 2,515 word-hints. Methods: To verify validity and difficulty of each item, 20 young and 16 older adults were tested. Using the crossword puzzle, the listener was required to hear word hint and sentence hint that could lead to the answers and say their own answers. Results: Results showed that, in general, the target words were more easily solved with sentence clues compared to series of words. For most of the puzzle items, young and older listeners answered the crossword puzzles correctly. Of 112 puzzles, 12 puzzle items showing less than the score of 80% were removed. Consequently, 100 crossword puzzles were selected as a final item, consisting of 452 answer (target) words, 452 sentence-hints, and 2,260 word-hints. Conclusion: Overall, the crossword puzzles developed in this study could be useful for adults regardless of age. Since the crossword puzzle is familiar and entertaining activity, it might better maintain motivation of auditory training compared to conventional training activity of word or sentence repetition. Further research is needed to generate a larger database of puzzle items and also to determine the feasibility of the crossword puzzles into the clinical purpose of aural rehabilitation for the hearing impaired.

Purpose: Auditory training involves active listening to auditory stimuli. Auditory training has been reported to enhance performance in various auditory tasks, supplementing the limitation of hearing aids. The purpose of this case was to determine efficacy of 10-week auditory training for two hearing aids (HA) users even though they have used hearing aids more than 10 years but having little satisfaction on their HAs. Methods: We conducted a 10-week in-laboratory audiotory training (one session per week, about 1 hour per session). Four types of materials (environmental sounds, consonants, sentences, and crossword quiz) were used as training stimuli. Difficulty level for training was adjusted focusing on the use of an adaptive method. To examine the efficacy of the 10-week training, the recognition abilities of environmental sounds, consonants, words, and sentences were compared before and immediately after the training. As a subjective outcome, the Korean Evaluation Scale for Hearing Handicap (KESHH) questionnaire was also conducted before and after training. To examine retention of training effects, we conducted the same evaluations at 10-week, one month and seven months after the completion of training. Results: The recognition scores of all stimuli were improved immediately after 10-week training. The results of the self-reported questionnaire of KESHH demonstrated that auditory training reduced subjective handicap from impaired hearing, indicating that auditory training positively affected individual's subjective satisfaction of HA. The training efficacy appeared to be maintained even seven months after the completion of training. Conclusion: Auditory training was effective to improve recognition performance as well as the subjective satisfaction of own HA for unsatisfactory HA users.