Factors underlying the speech-recognition performance of elderly hearing-aid wearers.

This paper reports the aided and unaided speech-recognition scores from a group of 171 elderly hearing-aid wearers. All hearing-aid wearers were fit with identical instruments (linear Class-D amplifiers with output-limiting compression) and evaluated with a standard protocol. In addition to including multiple measures of speech recognition, an extensive set of physiological and perceptual measures of auditory function, as well as general measures of cognitive function, were completed prior to the hearing-aid fitting. Comparison of the results from this study to available norms suggested that this group of participants was fairly typical or representative for their hearing loss and age. Approaches to the prediction of general speech-recognition performance that were examined included methods based on an acoustical index, the Speech Intelligibility Index (SII), and others based on linear-regression statistical analysis. The latter approach proved to be the most successful, accounting for about two-thirds of the variance in speech-recognition performance, with the primary predictive factors being measures of hearing loss and cognitive function.