Hearing Aids Benefit Recognition of Words in Emotional Speech but Not Emotion Identification.
Huiwen Goy, M Kathleen Pichora-Fuller, Gurjit Singh and 1 others
PMID 30249171WHAT IT FOUND
Hearing aids did not improve older users' identification of emotions in speech.
They did improve recognition of words spoken with emotion.
Key findings
01For older hearing aid users, aided word recognition averaged 65.1% correct, compared with 38.1% unaided, and the benefit was consistent across emotions.
02Emotion identification was not significantly better with hearing aids, with aided mean 41.8% and unaided mean 36.0%.
03Words spoken in the Happy or Sad conditions were less accurately recognized than words in several other emotion conditions.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
Read the rest of this summary
You get three full summaries a month, free, and we do not ask for a card. Search, the TL;DRs and your library stay unlimited either way.
What it does not show
The sample included only 14 older adults with hearing loss. Three recruited participants were replaced because they were dissatisfied with their hearing aids. Participants were experienced hearing aid users who reported satisfaction, so new or dissatisfied users were not represented. Participants were underfit relative to NAL-NL1 hearing aid targets by an average of 8.0 dB. Listening condition order was fixed: participants were tested unaided in session two and aided in session three. Five participants scored below the MoCA cut-off of 26. The follow-up comparison used 28 younger adults with normal hearing rather than age-matched controls. The discrete emotion-label method may not capture the variability of how each emotion is expressed.
Declared interests
The study reports funding from Sonova and Mitacs.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that hearing aids improve emotion identification. In this study, aided emotion-identification mean was 41.8% and unaided mean was 36.0%, and the difference was not statistically significant (p = .071).