Pacific Audiology Group

COURSE ABSTRACT:

One may see a bilingual client and wonder whether there should be different “programs” for the two languages. The SII tells most of the story but is far from the entire picture. The SII, while important, is simplistic in that it provides no information on word or sentence level cues. Grammars were examined for ten languages and alterations (not seen in the SII) are recommended for a “programming” change. Program #1 in a hearing aid may be set for English, for example, and Program #2 may be set for the other non-English language. Programming strategies will be provided based on frequency response changes, and changes to compression characteristics, including alternate compression release times.  

COURSE SUMMARY:

Clinically one may see a bilingual client and wonder whether there should be a different set of electro-acoustic parameters for the two languages of interest. Some research has been performed and most has been summarized by the Speech Intelligibility Index or SII. This has been used widely and is frequently used as a tool in the clinical assessment of hearing aids. The SII tells most of the story but is far from the entire picture. The SII, as implemented in some clinical real ear measurement devices, is typically based on English and not other languages, and the SII also provides no direct information on important syntactic items in a sentence that may have inherently low speaking intensity. That is, whereas the SII can provide information on the various speech sounds or phonemes, it does not provide information on word level and sentence level cues that may be very important as well. An example of a word level issue is Vietnamese where a typical word may consist of a consonant-vowel-consonant (or CVC) structure. In order for the quieter consonant following the more intense vowel to be audible, there should be a sufficient rapid compression release time and a clinical suggestion is to implement a quicker release time for speakers of Vietnamese versus a fitting for someone with a similar audiometric loss who is a speaker of English. For example, if a person is bilingual, one program can be set for English and another for Vietnamese (with a shorter release time on the compression system). We can look at Japanese for an example of a sentence level difference that would not be apparent on the SII. Japanese, like most languages that have a Subject-Object-Verb (SOV) word order has “post”-positions rather than prepositions that are found in Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) languages such as English. Postpositions (e.g. in, on, under, behind) in Japanese may be sentence final and as such, would be of low intensity. There is nothing specific to Japanese about the last word in a sentence being of low intensity- this is a normal characteristic of all speech where we simply are running out of air at the end of a sentence, so the last word or two is of lower intensity. Postpositions can be linguistically very important and if they are not as audible because of their position in a sentence, this could have ramifications for intelligibility. A clinical solution to this potential problem would be setting the WDRC circuitry to generate more gain for quieter sounds than for an “English program”. This has been confirmed experimentally and data will be presented to support this hypothesis. Grammars were examined for ten commonly spoken languages: Mandarin Chinese, Russian, Japanese, Vietnamese, Portuguese, Spanish, Somali, Hindi, French, and Arabic. Based on phoneme level (e.g. SII), word level and sentence level syntactic differences, hearing aid programming alterations are recommended that would allow important auditory cues to be heard by listeners of that particular language.  

LEARNING OBJECTIVES:

INSTRUCTOR 

Marshall Chasin  
Doctor of AudiologyAudiologist

As director of research and chief audiologist of the Musicians' Clinics of Canada, Marshall Chasin has the experience and knowledge help musicians with their specific hearing needs. As founding member of the Hearing Instrument Review Panel, Marshall Chasin has reviewed many new hearing aids, which allows him to choose from the very best for our clients. Marshall Chasin is the author of five books on hearing, hearing loss prevention, and hearing aids. He is an associate professor in Audiology at the University of Western Ontario; an adjunct professor in Linguistics at the University of Toronto; and an adjunct research associate at the State University of New York (SUNY) at Buffalo. Marshall is also the author of a weekly blog (www.hearinghealthmatters.org/hearthemusic) having over 10,000 monthly visitors.