Introducing real-life listening features into the clinical test environment: Part I: Measuring the hearing performance and evaluating the listening effort of individuals with normal hearing

Objective: Controlled clinical test environments are very different from real-life listening situations in which speaker and background noise level variations can hinder a person’s ability to hear and follow conversations. This study was performed to evaluate the ability of people with normal hearing to follow a single speaker in the presence of background noise, and to explore relations between those measures and the listeners’ subjective assessments, listening effort, and sound quality judgements.

Methods: A group of adults with normal hearing were evaluated using the following battery of tests: (i) Roving Level Test, (ii) the Just Understanding Speech Test, (iii) Performance Perceptual Test, (iv) the Visual Analogue Scale to evaluate listening effort, and (iv) with a sound quality questionnaire.

Results: The results show that people with normal hearing tend to accurately estimate their hearing abilities, and both the listening effort required and speech recognition thresholds tend to increase with increasing background noise.

Discussion: Implementing a battery of tests that evaluate speech-in-noise listening abilities, listening effort, and subjective hearing perception might provide greater insight into hearing performance than traditional measures. Additionally, the data generated in this study can be used for comparison with measures obtained from hearing impaired and hearing device listeners, and as such, has the potential to guide counselling and rehabilitation to a range of clinical populations.

Conclusion: The examination of both the self-estimated and verified performance measurements in simulated real-life listening situations can provide audiologists with a comprehensive and realistic profile of a person’s hearing performance.