BAA MAGAZINE SUMMER 2017 DRAFT 4

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BAA MAGAZINE / SPRING 2017 / 22
FEATURE Development of the Spatial Speech Assessment This study was submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the MSc degree in Advanced Audiology (UCL Ear Institute) BHAVISHA PARMAR Senior Audiologist RESEARCH SUPERVISORS DR J BIZLEY UCL Ear Institute DR D V VICKERS UCL Speech, Hearing and Phonetic Sciences Can we test a hearing aid user’s spatial hearing and speech discrimination at the same time? Introduction Current clinical tests of localisation and speech understanding do not reflect the difficulties faced when listening in the real world with competing speakers and other distractions. There are currently no gold standard tests of localisation for clinical practice (Volck et al 2015) and assessments of both localisation and speech discrimination tests are not routinely carried out for adult hearing aid users. However, there is a need to be able to assess hearing abilities, including the ability to identify and locate speech, in a way that reflects listening in the real world. With this requirement in mind, a simultaneous assessment of localisation and speech discrimination was developed by Bizley et al (2015) and used to test normal hearing participants. During this assessment, the participant was seated in the centre of the anechoic chamber and surrounded by eighteen speakers arranged at 150 intervals. The following sixteen monosyllabic words from the Chear Auditory Perception Test (CAPT) (Marriage et al. 2011) were spoken, in pairs, by a single female in the presence of multi-talker babble: A target word was presented Table 1: Monosyllabic words from the Chear Auditory Perception test (CAPT) (Marriage et al.2001) used in the simultaneous assessment of relative localisation and speech discrimination developed by Bizley et al (2015). followed by a reference word from an adjacent speaker. A touch-screen tablet was used to allow participants to report both words and the location of the target word in relation to the reference word. Word identification and word localisation percentage scores were recorded across speaker location. Bizley et al (2015) found that normal hearing listeners had the best relative localisation scores were for words coming from the front of space when compared to those presented in the periphery. This pattern reflects the superior availability of binaural localisation cues in frontal space. The inverse result was found for word identification with higher recognition scores being obtained in laterally rather than in frontal space. This effect is likely due to the effects of the head shadow effect enhancing the signalto-noise ratio at the near-ear giving a mono-aural advantage. Method The current study focussed on using the spatial speech assessment technique to test the performance of hearing aids in a group of five adults with bilateral moderate to severe sensorineural hearing loss. All five participants were experienced hearing aid users, but for the purposes of this study they were fitted with Phonak Sky Q hearing aids and given a period of six weeks to allow for acclimatisation before the assessments took place. The hearing aids were programmed with three different microphone programs – omnidirectional, directional and the binaural beamformer. All participants were given a hearing aid microphone diary, adapted from Cord et al (2002) to assess the subjective benefit of each microphone programme in different situations and asked to spend roughly equivalent amounts of time listening with each. After the six week trial, each participant returned to perform the spatial speech assessment. Before BAA MAGAZINE / SUMMER 2017 / 23
Page 1 and 2: This issue BAA Conference 2017 16 2
Page 3 and 4: Contents: General: 3 Editorial 4 Pr
Page 5 and 6: Power Your Senses Oticon NHS Study
Page 7 and 8: FEATURE To Assess the Effect of Che
Page 9 and 10: understanding conversation in a noi
Page 11 and 12: suitable, but instead, guide patien
Page 13 and 14: University using posters and email
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Page 19 and 20: Thursday 16th November Solent Hall
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Page 25 and 26: INFORMATION BAA Members - Education
Page 27 and 28: TRAINEES Deafness in Low and Middle
Page 29 and 30: INDUSTRY UPDATES The future is now:
Page 31 and 32: British Academy of Audiology 14th A

BAA MAGAZINE SUMMER 2017 DRAFT 4

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