![Sample our Health and Social Care journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5938/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Health-Social-Care.jpg"})
Abstract
We examined the ability of twenty-five hearing-impaired and eight normal-hearing listeners to discriminate between release time constants used for compression in hearing aids. The compressor was a standard three-channel system. The stimuli were normal and ‘vocoded’ sentences from a male and female database. In agreement with other studies looking at different outcomes, performance varied greatly across individuals. This variation was greater in hearing-impaired listeners, for whom the discriminability of a release time of 5 ms from one of 5000 ms (with the attack time fixed at 5 ms) ranged from chance to perfect. This variability was not significantly related to hearing impairment nor to individuals’ compression ratios.
| Abbreviations | ||
| CT | = | Compression thresholds (dB) |
| CR | = | Compression ratio |
| GCAM65 | = | Insertion gain for a speech-shaped noise at 65 dB SPL (dB) |
| x | = | Input level in a compression channel (dB) |
| GLD | = | Level-dependent gain (dB) |
| GID | = | Level-independent gain (dB) |
| Abbreviations | ||
| CT | = | Compression thresholds (dB) |
| CR | = | Compression ratio |
| GCAM65 | = | Insertion gain for a speech-shaped noise at 65 dB SPL (dB) |
| x | = | Input level in a compression channel (dB) |
| GLD | = | Level-dependent gain (dB) |
| GID | = | Level-independent gain (dB) |
Sumario
Examinamos la habilidad de veinticinco hipoacúsicos y ocho normoyentes para discriminar entre la liberación de constantes de tiempo utilizadas para la compresión en auxiliares auditivos. El compresor fue un sistema estándar de tres canales. Los estímulos fueron frases con voces masculinas y femeninas de una base de datos, normales y distorsionadas con vocoder. En concordancia con otros estudios el desempeño varió ampliamente entre individuos. Estas variaciones fueron mayores entre los hipoacúsicos para quienes la discriminación de un tiempo de liberación de 5 ms contra uno de 5000 ms (con el tiempo de ataque fijo en 5 ms) varió del azar a la perfección. Esta variabilidad no se relacionó significativamente con la desventaja auditiva ni con los rangos individuales de compresión.