Hearing and Microphone Distance and Speech Intelligibility

Abstract

Two sets of synthetic sentences were tape recorded through two identical hearing aids at different distances from the talker in a background of noise. The recordings were made during a regular session of a hearing-impaired nursery program. One hearing aid was approximately 2.5 meters from the talker and constituted the "Far" condition, while a second aid was approximately 25 centimeters from the talker and constituted the "Near" condition. The two aids led to separate channels of a tape recorder. Sentences under the two conditions were recorded simultaneously on the two channels of the recorder. The tape was played back to eleven normal listeners. Their sentence identification scores were 10 percent for the "Far" and 98.5 percent for the "Near" condition. These results support recommendations that personnel working with hearing-impaired children should talk as near as possible to the microphone of the aided child. Talking near the microphone improves speech reception through hearing aids, auditory trainers or any other electroacoustic system.