Abstract:
Subjective assessments of the severity of hearing aid distortion were obtained using both rating scale and paired comparison measures, with sentence materials. Data were collected under 30 hearing aid conditions, representing a broad range of real hearing aid distortions. These data were related to a range of objective (engineering) measures of hearing aid distortion, including techniques based on pure tones (THD, IMD), measures using broadband noise stimuli having certain speech-like characteristics, and measures derived from real speech. Data from both normal and hearing-impaired subjects were stable and orderly, with good agreement between datasets collected using paired comparison and rating scale methods. Correlations with behavioral data were significantly better for certain speech-based objective measures than electroacoustic measures based on noise or pure-tone signals. [Work supported by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada.]