Benefit from spatial separation of multiple talkers in bilateral hearing-aid users: Effects of hearing loss, age, and cognition

Neher, Tobias; Behrens, Thomas; Carlile, Simon; Jin, Craig; Kragelund, Louise; Petersen, Anne Specht; Schaik, André van

doi:10.3109/14992020903079332

Cited by 66 publications

(76 citation statements)

References 52 publications

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“…There were, nonetheless, nine individuals who demonstrated masking release of 2 dB or greater, suggesting that they had access to spatial cues when wearing bilateral hearing aids and were able to use the cues for speech unmasking. Consistent with findings from Marrone et al (2008a), Neher et al (2009), andAhlstrom et al (2009) on adult users of bilateral hearing aids and earlier data on children (Ching et al, 2005), the present results suggest that spatial advantages are possible with current hearing-aid technology and fitting in conditions where no adaptive features were engaged. Larger spatial advantage would be expected if directional microphones were used, but such use was not routine clinical practice for children at the time the data were collected.…”

Section: B Srm: Effect Of Age and Hearing Thresholdssupporting

confidence: 81%

Spatial release from masking in normal-hearing children and children who use hearing aids

Ching

Wanrooy

Dillon

et al. 2011

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

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Listening to speech in competing sounds poses a major difficulty for children with impaired hearing. This study aimed to determine the ability of children (3-12 yr of age) to use spatial separation between target speech and competing babble to improve speech intelligibility. Fifty-eight children (31 with normal hearing and 27 with impaired hearing who use bilateral hearing aids) were assessed by word and sentence material. Speech reception thresholds (SRTs) were measured with speech presented from 0 azimuth, and competing babble from either 0 or 690 azimuth. Spatial release from masking (SRM) was defined as the difference between SRTs measured with co-located speech and babble and SRTs measured with spatially separated speech and babble. On average, hearingimpaired children attained near-normal performance when speech and babble originated from the frontal source, but performed poorer than their normal-hearing peers when babble was spatially separated from target speech. On average, normal-hearing children obtained an SRM of 3 dB whereas children with hearing loss did not demonstrate SRM. Results suggest that hearing-impaired children may need enhancement in signal-to-noise ratio to hear speech in difficult listening conditions as well as normal-hearing children.

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Section: B Srm: Effect Of Age and Hearing Thresholdssupporting

confidence: 81%

Spatial release from masking in normal-hearing children and children who use hearing aids

Ching

Wanrooy

Dillon

et al. 2011

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

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“…Listeners with hearing impairment (HI) often demonstrate reduced SRM compared to listeners with normal hearing (NH) in multitalker listening situations (e.g., Marrone et al, 2008;Neher et al, 2009;Glyde et al, 2013b), leading to the common notion that spatial processing is disrupted by hearing loss. However, attempts to provide convergent evidence from other kinds of spatial tasks have produced very mixed results.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Use of a glimpsing model to understand the performance of listeners with and without hearing loss in spatialized speech mixtures

Best

Mason

Swaminathan

et al. 2017

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

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In many situations, listeners with sensorineural hearing loss demonstrate reduced spatial release from masking compared to listeners with normal hearing. This deficit is particularly evident in the "symmetric masker" paradigm in which competing talkers are located to either side of a central target talker. However, there is some evidence that reduced target audibility (rather than a spatial deficit per se) under conditions of spatial separation may contribute to the observed deficit. In this study a simple "glimpsing" model (applied separately to each ear) was used to isolate the target information that is potentially available in binaural speech mixtures. Intelligibility of these glimpsed stimuli was then measured directly. Differences between normally hearing and hearingimpaired listeners observed in the natural binaural condition persisted for the glimpsed condition, despite the fact that the task no longer required segregation or spatial processing. This result is consistent with the idea that the performance of listeners with hearing loss in the spatialized mixture was limited by their ability to identify the target speech based on sparse glimpses, possibly as a result of some of those glimpses being inaudible.

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“…This confirms the findings of multiple previous studies (Lunner, 2003;Foo et al, 2007;Lunner and Sundewall-Thorén, 2007;Neher et al, 2009;Souza et al, 2010;Rudner et al, 2011;Ng et al, 2013). Although hearing loss (PTA) and WM capacity (RS score) were statistically unrelated, the two factors explained 22.6% of the variance in the speech-recognition performance.…”

Section: Behavioural and Neural Findings Support The Elumodelsupporting

confidence: 81%

“…Two (Neher et al, 2011;Zekveld et al, 2014) out of three studies (Neher et al, 2009) investigating the relationship between the RS score and speech understanding of spatially separated sounds, similarly observed no relation between the two. In one of the studies, a significant effect of attention was found on the speech recognition (Neher et al, 2011).…”

Section: Behavioural and Neural Findings Support The Elumodelmentioning

confidence: 89%

Neural and Cognitive Effects of Hearing Loss on Speech Processing

Petersen¹

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Understanding speech in the presence of background noise can be difficulty and even more so if you suffer from a hearing loss. Although speech understanding depends on hearing acuity, the individual capacity to perform higher-order Working Memory (WM) processing also plays an important role (Lunner, 2003). Despite the impact of cognition on speech processing, it has yet to be determined how hearing loss influences neural signatures of WM processing. By examining the dynamic behaviour of the electroencephalogram (EEG), it is possible to investigate how hearing loss and listening condition affect the neural processing of speech.The aim of the current thesis was to investigate how hearing loss in elderly listeners influenced speech processing by examining both behavioural and neural measures of the cognitive involvement. In three studies, we tested the hypothesis that hearing loss and adverse listening conditions result in increased cognitive involvement. In the first study (Paper I), worse hearing and lower WM capacity related to poorer performance in a speech-in-noise task where the sound sources were spatially co-located. In a similar speech-in-noise task with spatially separated sounds, the performance was influenced by hearing loss, but not WM capacity. This suggests that the reading span test, used for quantifying the WM capacity, inadequately describes the dynamic nature of the WM involvement under speech processing. In relation to the theoretical Ease of Language Understanding (ELU) model, the results partly confirmed the view that WM abilities are more important during speech processing for listeners suffering from a hearing loss. As suggested by the inconsistent observations in Paper I, there is a need for more objective and dynamic measures in order to understand the relation between WM processing, speech understanding, and hearing loss.An interesting, cheap, and potentially portable technology for objectively measuring the WM involvement during speech processing is EEG. As a measure of WM involvement, the alpha oscillations (~10 Hz activity in the EEG) was examined during an auditory delayed-match-to-sample task (Paper II). Despite equal taskperformance, alpha power was generally higher in listeners with worse hearing. This indicates that worse hearing is linearly related to higher cognitive load during speech processing. In the most difficult experimental condition, an alpha-power breakdown was observed for listeners with the highest degree of hearing loss. This suggests that the generation of alpha power reached an upper ceiling-level, resulting in a breakdown. The internal degradation of the auditory signal brought on by the hearing loss appear to require activation of additional WM resources in order to be overcome.A potential cause for this increased cognitive load in listeners with worse hearing was investigated in a competing-talker experiment in Paper III. Here, the effect of Abstract ii hearing loss on the ability to selectively attend to a particular speech stream was examined by cross-correla...

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Benefit from spatial separation of multiple talkers in bilateral hearing-aid users: Effects of hearing loss, age, and cognition

Cited by 66 publications

References 52 publications

Spatial release from masking in normal-hearing children and children who use hearing aids

Spatial release from masking in normal-hearing children and children who use hearing aids

Use of a glimpsing model to understand the performance of listeners with and without hearing loss in spatialized speech mixtures

Neural and Cognitive Effects of Hearing Loss on Speech Processing

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