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The effect of stimulus duration on preferences for gain adjustments when listening to speech

OBJECTIVES: In the personalisation of hearing-aid fittings, gain is often adjusted to suit patient preferences using live speech. When using brief sentences as stimuli, the minimum gain adjustments necessary to elicit consistent preferences (“preference thresholds”) were previously found to be much...

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Autores principales: Whitmer, William M., Caswell-Midwinter, Benjamin, Naylor, Graham
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: 2022
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7613777/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34762024
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14992027.2021.1998676
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author Whitmer, William M.
Caswell-Midwinter, Benjamin
Naylor, Graham
author_facet Whitmer, William M.
Caswell-Midwinter, Benjamin
Naylor, Graham
author_sort Whitmer, William M.
collection PubMed
description OBJECTIVES: In the personalisation of hearing-aid fittings, gain is often adjusted to suit patient preferences using live speech. When using brief sentences as stimuli, the minimum gain adjustments necessary to elicit consistent preferences (“preference thresholds”) were previously found to be much greater than typical adjustments in current practice. The current study examined the role of duration on preference thresholds. DESIGN: Participants heard 2, 4 and 6-s segments of a continuous monologue presented successively in pairs. The first segment of each pair was presented at each individual’s real-ear or prescribed gain. The second segment was presented with a ±0–12 dB gain adjustment in one of three frequency bands. Participants judged whether the second was “better”, “worse” or “no different” from the first. STUDY SAMPLE: Twenty-nine adults, all with hearing-aid experience. RESULTS: The minimum gain adjustments needed to elicit “better” or “worse” judgments decreased with increasing duration for most adjustments. Inter-participant agreement and intra-participant reliability increased with increasing duration up to 4 s, then remained stable. CONCLUSIONS: Providing longer stimuli improves the likelihood of patients providing reliable judgments of hearing-aid gain adjustments, but the effect is limited, and alternative fitting methods may be more viable for effective hearing-aid personalisation.
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spelling pubmed-76137772022-11-01 The effect of stimulus duration on preferences for gain adjustments when listening to speech Whitmer, William M. Caswell-Midwinter, Benjamin Naylor, Graham Int J Audiol Article OBJECTIVES: In the personalisation of hearing-aid fittings, gain is often adjusted to suit patient preferences using live speech. When using brief sentences as stimuli, the minimum gain adjustments necessary to elicit consistent preferences (“preference thresholds”) were previously found to be much greater than typical adjustments in current practice. The current study examined the role of duration on preference thresholds. DESIGN: Participants heard 2, 4 and 6-s segments of a continuous monologue presented successively in pairs. The first segment of each pair was presented at each individual’s real-ear or prescribed gain. The second segment was presented with a ±0–12 dB gain adjustment in one of three frequency bands. Participants judged whether the second was “better”, “worse” or “no different” from the first. STUDY SAMPLE: Twenty-nine adults, all with hearing-aid experience. RESULTS: The minimum gain adjustments needed to elicit “better” or “worse” judgments decreased with increasing duration for most adjustments. Inter-participant agreement and intra-participant reliability increased with increasing duration up to 4 s, then remained stable. CONCLUSIONS: Providing longer stimuli improves the likelihood of patients providing reliable judgments of hearing-aid gain adjustments, but the effect is limited, and alternative fitting methods may be more viable for effective hearing-aid personalisation. 2022-11 2021-11-11 /pmc/articles/PMC7613777/ /pubmed/34762024 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14992027.2021.1998676 Text en https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
spellingShingle Article
Whitmer, William M.
Caswell-Midwinter, Benjamin
Naylor, Graham
The effect of stimulus duration on preferences for gain adjustments when listening to speech
title The effect of stimulus duration on preferences for gain adjustments when listening to speech
title_full The effect of stimulus duration on preferences for gain adjustments when listening to speech
title_fullStr The effect of stimulus duration on preferences for gain adjustments when listening to speech
title_full_unstemmed The effect of stimulus duration on preferences for gain adjustments when listening to speech
title_short The effect of stimulus duration on preferences for gain adjustments when listening to speech
title_sort effect of stimulus duration on preferences for gain adjustments when listening to speech
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7613777/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34762024
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14992027.2021.1998676
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