CAN PHONEME REPRESENTATION BE OBJECTIVELY MEASURED BETWEEN THREE FREQUENCY LOWERING HEARING AIDS?

Curry E, Clark J.

University of Texas at Dallas, Dallas, USA.

Frequency lowering technology such as frequency transposition or compression has lately become more accepted as a solution to enhance perception of high frequencies for individuals experiencing precipitously sloping high frequency hearing loss. Reportedly, such hearing aids will provide better phoneme representation via frequency transposition or compression of the input stimulus.  Some of the disadvantages anecdotally reported by patients are unnatural sounding speech and consonant confusion particularly for the highest frequency phonemes, such as /s/, most likely due to an increase in the low frequency noise.  Though many studies have looked at the effectiveness of individual strategies through patient perception paradigms, few studies have objectively evaluated the acoustical impact of frequency lowering technology used in hearing aids or the differences between them. This study explored real ear differences between male and female recorded speech material presented through three different frequency lowering hearing aids coupled to KEMAR.  After programming the hearing aids with a high frequency profound hearing loss,  probe microphone values of recorded male and female speech stimuli presented via soundfield at a comfortable conversational speech intensity level (i.e. 70 dB HL). This poster will demonstrate acoustic characteristics of various phoneme representations according to gender in three commercially available frequency lowering hearing aids.

Email: ekcurry@student.utdallas.edu