Sound Perception Study of Hearing-impaired People With Hearing Aids
ÉTude de la pERception soNorE de Personnes maLentendantes équipées d'Aides Auditives
Institut Pasteur
75 participants
Apr 22, 2025
INTERVENTIONAL
Conditions
Summary
The aim of the ETERNEL project will be to study the influence of the perception of a single sound timbre on the understanding of a complex sound scene in hearing-impaired people with hearing aids. This will be done by quantifying the inability to manage a complex sound scene as a function of the timbre of the sounds making it up. The more a sound interferes with understanding the complex sound scene, the more salient that sound is considered to be. In this way, the investigators can determine which timbre dimensions make sounds particularly salient for the hearing impaired.
Eligibility
Inclusion Criteria13
- For all participants:
- Age between 60 and 75
- Native French speaker
- Have given their consent to take part in the study.
- Declare that they have an active social life or hobbies that stimulate their cognitive abilities
- Have a MOCA score above 26
- No tympano-ossicular dysfunction.
- Voice in noise audiometry results showing normal results.
- For participants with impaired hearing :
- Pure tone audiometry showing audiograms of type N3 or N4 and symmetrical between the two ears.
- Report having experienced problems with abnormally prominent sound.
- For participants with normal hearing:
- \- Pure tone audiometry showing audiograms with losses of less than 30 dBHl.
Exclusion Criteria3
- Be under guardianship or curatorship,
- Be deprived of liberty by judicial or administrative decision, or be under legal protection.
- Bear the consequences of an ear infection and/or have a history of an ENT disease that permanently affects hearing or balance (vestibular schwannoma, Ménière's disease, sudden or fluctuating deafness, congenital hypoacusis).
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Interventions
The experiment consists of evaluating the sound level of n complex stimuli, then equalising them in loudness, in order to measure a loudness curve in function of timbre descriptors. The stimuli will then be listened to again in pairs. The task is there to compare the stimuli using a VAS to indicate how different the two sounds are.
The experiment consists in identifying the parameters of the sound timbre that most disturb the understanding of complex sound scenes, by asking the participants to identify sounds whose timbre has been modified.
The experiment will be identical to intervention 2. This time, the modification of the stimulus timbres will focus on the most problematic dimensional modifications, i.e. those where the difference between normal-hearing and hearing-impaired listeners is greatest. We will then modify the signal processing parameters of the hearing aid simulator (for example, the size of the averaging window or the gain balance of the filters), to observe their impact on the salience of certain stimuli.
Locations(1)
View Full Details on ClinicalTrials.gov
For the most up-to-date information, visit the official listing.
NCT06691087