Modeling the relationship between listener factors and signal modification: A pooled analysis spanning a decade

The overarching goal of our work is to understand how listeners respond to hearing aid processing and consequently inform individualized hearing aid treatment. Our previous work demonstrated that individual cognitive abilities, age, and hearing loss contribute to variability in response to cumulative signal modifications introduced by hearing aid processing and background noise. Specifically, older individuals with poorer working memory and more hearing loss were more susceptible to signal modifications introduced by hearing aid processing. These relationships were established in independent studies involving systematic manipulations of compression, digital noise reduction, frequency lowering, or microphone directionality. In this study, we present a hierarchical pooled analysis of data collected from six previous studies to develop a unified statistical model of the relationships between response to signal modification and individual listener variables. Across studies, signal modification is quantified using a cepstral correlation metric that accounts for cumulative envelope distortions arising from hearing aid processing and background noise. The statistical model will determine how working memory, age, and degree of hearing loss mediate the relationship between signal modification and speech intelligibility in noise across a large dataset. Both inferential and predictive applications of the combined data and model will be discussed. [Work supported by NIDCD.]