The relationship between speech recognition, behavioural listening effort, and subjective ratings.

OBJECTIVE: The purpose of this study was to evaluate the reliability and validity of four subjective questions related to listening effort. A secondary purpose of this study was to evaluate the effects of hearing aid beamforming microphone arrays on word recognition and listening effort.

DESIGN: Participants answered subjective questions immediately following testing in a dual-task paradigm with three microphone settings in a moderately reverberant laboratory environment in two noise configurations. Participants rated their: (1) mental work, (2) desire to improve the situation, (3) tiredness, and (4) desire to give up. Data were analysed using repeated measures and reliability analyses.

STUDY SAMPLE: Eighteen adults with symmetrical sensorineural hearing loss participated.

RESULTS: Beamforming differentially affected word recognition and listening effort. Analysis revealed the same pattern of results for behavioural listening effort and subjective ratings of desire to improve the situation. Conversely, ratings of work revealed the same pattern of results as word recognition performance. Ratings of tiredness and desire to give up were unaffected by hearing aid microphone or noise configuration.

CONCLUSIONS: Participant ratings of their desire to control the listening situation appear to reliable subjective indicators of listening effort that align with results from a behavioural measure of listening effort.