Behavioral assessment of CID's benchtop (version 2) digital hearing aid: noise reduction.

Perceptual rating and word identification procedures were used to evaluate the efficacy of several digital hearing aid adaptive and nonadaptive noise reduction algorithm parameters. The study included 15 hearing-impaired adults listening to speech at soft, moderate, and loud input levels in quiet, fan noise, and multitalker babble noise. The results suggest that hearing-impaired listeners can make clarity judgments that result in the selection of algorithms that optimize word intelligibility at soft and moderate speech levels. The spectral adaptation requirements, however, were not constant with signal level.