An examination of speech reception thresholds measured in a simulated reverberant cafeteria environment

Abstract

Objective: There is increasing demand in the hearing research community for the creation of laboratory environments that better simulate challenging real-world listening environments. The hope is that the use of such environments for testing will lead to more meaningful assessments of listening ability, and better predictions about the performance of hearing devices. Here we present one approach for simulating a complex acoustic environment in the laboratory, and investigate the effect of transplanting a speech test into such an environment. Design: Speech reception thresholds were measured in a simulated reverberant cafeteria, and in a more typical anechoic laboratory environment containing background speech babble. Study sample: The participants were 46 listeners varying in age and hearing levels, including 25 hearing-aid wearers who were tested with and without their hearing aids. Results: Reliable SRTs were obtained in the complex environment, but led to different estimates of performance and hearing-aid benefit from those measured in the standard environment. Conclusions: The findings provide a starting point for future efforts to increase the real-world relevance of laboratory-based speech tests.

Key Words::

• Speech reception thresholds
• real-world
• hearing loss
• hearing aids

Notes

Acknowledgements

The authors acknowledge the financial support of the HEARing CRC, established and supported under the Cooperative Research Centres Program, an Australian Government initiative. Virginia Best was also partially supported by NIH/NIDCD grant DC04545. We are grateful to Margot McLelland for assistance with data collection and to Harvey Dillon and Mark Seeto for several helpful discussions. Portions of this work were presented at the International Hearing Aid Research Conference (August 2012), the International Congress on Acoustics (June 2013), the International Conference on Cognitive Hearing Science for Communication (June 2013), and the XXXII World Congress of Audiology (May 2014).

Declaration of interest: The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

Notes

1. One NH listener was unable to complete the questionnaire and thus results from only 17 listeners are presented.

2. One listener did not have time to complete the directivity index measurement and thus only 24 measurements are analysed.