Individual variation in sound localization accuracy with hearing aids and associations with speech understanding in spatialized speech mixtures

Abstract

Listeners with hearing loss report difficulty understanding speech in the presence of background talkers (the “cocktail party problem”) even while wearing hearing aids. In this listening situation, a listener must be able to focus on the target talker using cues related to the talker’s voice and spatial location. Hearing aids provide necessary amplification for listeners with hearing loss, but they can also disrupt sound localization, which may counteract the positive effects and impact speech recognition in spatialized speech mixtures. To investigate this possibility, we conducted a study in which normally hearing listeners performed two tasks with and without hearing aids. In one task, listeners localized individual words presented from loudspeakers. In another task, a five-talker mixture was presented and listeners identified words spoken by a target talker at a specified location. We observed striking individual variations in the degree of disruption in localization accuracy with hearing aids, which were associated with reductions in word identification accuracy. The results highlight that there are listener-specific effects of hearing aids on spatial perception that may impact speech understanding in cocktail party environments, although additional work is needed to evaluate these effects in listeners with hearing loss. [Work supported by NIH NIDCD R01DC015760.]