Article
Measuring Objective Speech Intelligibility and Listening Effort in Ecological Momentary Assessment (en)
* Presenting author
Abstract:
Listening problems in everyday life are often assessed by Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA), where participants answer questionnaires on the current situation several times daily. Questions about subjective speech understanding in EMA typically suffer from ceiling effects and depend on contextual cues like lip reading or predictability of the content of the speech (as do questions about listening effort). Hence it is desirable to supplement subjectively reported speech understanding with an objective measure. In a pilot experiment with 10 experienced hearing aid users we investigated if a logatome test is suitable to assess speech intelligibility and listening effort in everyday life. Participants were fitted with hearing aids containing two programs of different gains which alternated daily. During a 14-day field trial participants were prompted to answer a questionnaire including a logatome test of 12 phonemes at least six times per day. In addition, the average broadband sound pressure level was recorded. For higher sound pressure levels, objective speech understanding decreased and reaction time increased. Even without adjusting the difficulty level of the logatome test to the environmental noise level, 100% performance was reached only in 13.74% of tests while subjectively the highest possible speech understanding was reported in 35.64% of situations.