Abstract
Children with significant high-frequency hearing loss may be difficult to fit with hearing aids using conventional amplification. Frequency-lowering hearing aids using dynamic speech recoding (DSR) technology have been proposed as a possible means to achieve full speech audibility. The current study investigated 78 children from ages 1.3 to 21.6 years (M = 10.6 years) who wore DSR hearing aids. These hearing aids provided significant improvements in pure-tone average (PTA; mean improvement for the aided versus unaided condition of 49 dB) and high-frequency PTA (mean improvement for the aided versus unaided condition of 56 dB). A subgroup of 19 children were previous usere of conventional hearing aids. These participants demonstrated a mean improvement of 11 dB in PTA and 12.5% in word recognition scores for DSR versus conventional amplification. However, DSR hearing aids required repair 3 times as often as conventional hearing aids. The greatest benefit was observed in children whose word recognition scores were poorest using conventional hearing aids.
Original language | English (US) |
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Pages (from-to) | 106-113 |
Number of pages | 8 |
Journal | American Journal of Audiology |
Volume | 12 |
Issue number | 2 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Dec 1 2003 |
Keywords
- Children
- Hearing aid benefit
- Hearing aids
- Speech recoding hearing aids