New Perspectives on Assessing Amplification Effects

under optimal listening conditions in a quiet sound booth, there is still a wide range of performance variability.3 How, then, can we determine whether poor speech recognition is due to the hearing aid (eg, inadequate audibility, alteration of critical cues, or signal-processing parameters not optimal for the individual) versus the individual’s ability to make use of the amplified sound? The contribution of a hearing aid to speech recognition can be viewed as a series of linked stages (Figure 1): 1. Representation of the acoustic content of the incoming signal 2. Modification of the signal by the processing parameters of the hearing ai