Word Recognition and Learning: Effects of Hearing Loss and Amplification Feature.
Andrea L Pittman, Elizabeth C Stewart, Amanda P Willman and 1 others
PMID 29169314WHAT IT FOUND
Children with hearing loss gained benefit from wideband amplification on word recognition, real and nonsense word tasks, and word learning.
Adults gained only on word learning. Digital noise reduction did not add benefit, and it did not worsen performance.
Key findings
01In quiet, children with hearing loss improved on all three tasks when hearing aids provided extended bandwidth, while adults improved only on word learning.
02Digital noise reduction did not provide additional benefit or cause a decrement in steady-state noise or multitalker babble.
03Even with the tested aided settings, adults with hearing loss often performed below normal-hearing peers, and children with hearing loss still had difficulty with familiar word recognition.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The results may not generalize to other hearing-aid models or manufacturers, especially digital noise reduction, because this feature is implemented differently across devices. Each feature was tested in small subgroups, such as 8 children with hearing loss and 8 adults with hearing loss in the multitalker babble condition. 1 adult and 1 child with hearing loss were lost to follow-up, and missing data occurred because of procedural errors or test refinement at the start of the project. The adults with hearing loss had a nearly 20 dB difference at 8 kHz compared with the children, which may have limited their use of high-frequency amplification. The word-learning task depended on hearing the high-frequency /s/ in plural forms, so poor learning scores could reflect inability to hear /s/ rather than poor learning. Adults and children were not compared directly.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that digital noise reduction improves speech perception. The children's better performance with noise reduction was compared with the unaided condition, not with the aided condition without noise reduction, and adults showed no benefit; performance did not change when the feature was activated.