Whitmer WM, Caswell-Midwinter B, Naylor G. The effect of stimulus duration on preferences for gain adjustments when listening to speech.
Int J Audiol 2021;
61:940-947. [PMID:
34762024 PMCID:
PMC7613777 DOI:
10.1080/14992027.2021.1998676]
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Abstract
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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