Investigation of hearing aid users' speech understanding in noise and their spectral-temporal resolution skills

Purpose: Our study aims to compare speech understanding in noise and spectral- temporal resolution skills with regard to the degree of hearing loss, age, hearing aid use experience and gender of hearing aid users.Methods: Our study included sixty-eight hearing aid users aged between 40-70 years, with bilateral mild and moderate symmetrical sensorineural hearing loss. Random gap detection test, Turkish matrix test and spectral-temporally modulated ripple test were implemented on the participants with bilateral hearing aids. The test results acquired were compared statistically according to different variables and the correlations were examined.Results: No statistically significant differences were observed for speech-in-noise recognition, spectraltemporal resolution among older and younger adults in hearing aid users (p>0.05). There wasn't found a statistically significant difference among test outcomes as regards different hearing loss degrees (p>0.05). Higher performances were obtained in terms of temporal resolution in male participants and participants with more hearing aid use experience (p<0.05). Significant correlations were obtained between the results of speech-in-noise recognition, temporal resolution and spectral resolution tests performed with hearing aids (p<0.05).Conclusion: Our study findings emphasized the importance of regular hearing aid use and it showed that some auditory skills can be improved with hearing aids. Observation of correlations among the speechin-noise recognition, temporal resolution and spectral resolution tests have revealed that these skills should be evaluated as a whole to maximize the patient's communication abilities.& COPY; 2023 PLA General Hospital Department of Otolaryngology Head and Neck Surgery. Production and hosting by Elsevier (Singapore) Pte Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).