Simulations of hearing loss and hearing aid: Effects on electrophysiological correlates of listening effort

In the last decades, many investigations were done to examine the effects of sensorineural hearing loss on the speech perception ability. Besides testing hearing impaired persons, there is also the possibility to simulate the hearing loss. Therefore, some electrophysiological as well as speech recognition studies were performed in normal hearing subjects using techniques to model the sensorineural hearing loss. Thus, the effects of peripheral hearing loss without central auditory pathologies can be examined. In previous studies, we have shown, that the wavelet phase synchronization stability (WPSS) of auditory late responses could serve as a possible indicator of listening effort. Now, the aims of this present study were to explore the effects on the WPSS by using two different simulations of hearing loss and a simulated hearing aid. The preliminary results showed, that in case of a simultaneous simulation of hearing loss by noise masking and a hearing aid, an objective discrimination between an easy and a difficult listening situation can be achieved. Furthermore, the WPSS reflected also a good discrimination by using the filtered and attenuated paradigms.