Spatial Release From Masking With Bilateral Bone Conduction Stimulation at Mastoid for Normal Hearing Subjects.
Jie Wang, Sijia Xie, Stefan Stenfelt and 3 others
PMID 38549451WHAT IT FOUND
Normal-hearing listeners understood Mandarin sentences better when masking noise was moved away from the target.
Bone conduction at the mastoid produced spatial benefit, but less than air conduction, and needed at least 10 degrees.
Key findings
01With bone conduction at the mastoid, speech recognition improved significantly when the masker was separated from the target by 10 degrees or more.
02The largest bone-conduction spatial release from masking was 13.9 dB when the masker was 150 degrees from the target.
03At 150 degrees, air conduction gave 5.4 dB more spatial release from masking than bone conduction.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
Only nine normal-hearing adults were tested, all young and Mandarin speakers. The participants had normal hearing, so the results do not show how people with hearing loss would perform. The bone-conduction transducers were laboratory devices held at the mastoid, not clinical bone-conduction hearing aids. Air-conduction testing was always done first and bone-conduction testing second, 2 months apart, so session effects cannot be ruled out. The sounds were virtual and used nonindividual head-related transfer functions, not real loudspeakers in a room.
Declared interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest. Funding was from the National Science Fund of China under grant numbers 11974086 and 12074403, and from Guangzhou and Guangdong provincial funds.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that bone-conduction hearing aids improve speech understanding in noise for patients. The study used young normal-hearing listeners, laboratory transducers at the mastoid, and virtual sounds, and bone conduction produced less spatial release than air conduction.