PDF(Pubmed)
Abstract：
Hearing aids and other hearing devices should provide the user with a benefit, for example, compensate for effects of a hearing loss or cancel undesired sounds. However, wearing hearing devices can also have negative effects on perception, previously demonstrated mostly for spatial hearing, sound quality and the perception of the own voice. When hearing devices are set to transparency, that is, provide no gain and resemble open-ear listening as well as possible, these side effects can be studied in isolation. In the present work, we conducted a series of experiments that are concerned with the effect of transparent hearing devices on speech perception in a collocated speech-in-noise task. In such a situation, listening through a hearing device is not expected to have any negative effect, since both speech and noise undergo identical processing, such that the signal-to-noise ratio at ear is not altered and spatial effects are irrelevant. However, we found a consistent hearing device disadvantage for speech intelligibility and similar trends for rated listening effort. Several hypotheses for the possible origin for this disadvantage were tested by including several different devices, gain settings and stimulus levels. While effects of self-noise and nonlinear distortions were ruled out, the exact reason for a hearing device disadvantage on speech perception is still unclear. However, a significant relation to auditory model predictions demonstrate that the speech intelligibility disadvantage is related to sound quality, and is most probably caused by insufficient equalization, artifacts of frequency-dependent signal processing and processing delays.
摘要：
助听器和其他听力设备应为用户提供好处，例如,补偿听力损失的影响或消除不希望的声音。然而,佩戴听力设备也会对感知产生负面影响，以前主要用于空间听觉，声音质量和对自己声音的感知。当听力设备设置为透明时，也就是说,不提供增益，尽可能像开耳倾听，这些副作用可以单独研究。在目前的工作中,我们进行了一系列实验，这些实验涉及透明听力设备对语音感知的影响。在这种情况下,通过听力设备收听不会产生任何负面影响，由于语音和噪声都经过相同的处理，这样耳朵的信噪比不会改变，空间效应是无关紧要的。然而,我们发现了一个一致的听力设备缺点的语音清晰度和类似的趋势的额定听力努力。通过包括几种不同的设备来测试这种缺点的可能起源的几种假设，增益设置和刺激水平。虽然排除了自噪声和非线性失真的影响，听力设备在言语感知方面存在劣势的确切原因仍不清楚。然而,与听觉模型预测的显着关系表明，语音清晰度的缺点与声音质量有关，很可能是由均衡不足引起的，与频率相关的信号处理和处理延迟的伪影。
