Speech Perception in Classroom Acoustics by Children With Hearing Loss and Wearing Hearing Aids.
Frank Iglehart
PMID 31835909WHAT IT FOUND
Children with hearing aids understood speech better as classroom reverberation shortened.
Above 90% correct scores were absent in 0.9-s reverberation and appeared at more, and lower, SNRs in 0.3-s reverberation. Sound-booth scores may overestimate classroom ability.
Key findings
01As classroom reverberation shortened from 0.9 s to 0.6 s to 0.3 s, mean SNR-50 scores fell from 7.87 dB to 5.77 dB to 4.76 dB, and each change was significant.
02A classroom mean score above 90% correct did not occur in 0.9-s reverberation, and it occurred at more, and lower, SNRs in 0.3-s reverberation.
03The mean SNR-50 score changed significantly from 4.76 dB in 0.3-s classroom reverberation to 1.90 dB in the sound booth.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
Only 10 children took part, with ages from 7.1 to 16.0 years and a wide range of hearing losses, so the results may not apply to all children who use hearing aids. The hearing thresholds came from audiograms provided by parents, and the paper did not confirm them or test whether the hearing aids were appropriately fitted. The BKB-SIN test was used in ways the authors say were not validated, including adaptive start signal-to-noise ratios, shortened list lengths, and testing in reverberation as well as noise. One child younger than 8 years listened to fewer list pairs than the other children, which may have increased variability. The classroom test did not represent a normal classroom: the listener sat at a fixed position 3.0 m from the speech source, only three people were present, and noise came consistently from all directions. The study did not analyse whether binaural versus monaural hearing aids affected the results.
The easy way to misread this
Do not assume a child’s sound-booth speech-in-noise score predicts classroom speech perception. The mean sound-booth score was 2.86 dB SNR-50 better than the score in the 0.3-s classroom reverberation condition, and the paper says near-anechoic results may overestimate ability.