The Efficiency of Binaural Listening Among the Hearing-Impaired

Issuing two hearing aids for simultaneous use

“…Most of the experimental studies so far published on binaural hearing aids deal solely with speech facilitation in noise, and their results are about evenly divided. Markle and Aber (1958), Belzile and Markle (1959), Wright and Carhart (1960) and Olsen and Carhart (1967), for example, reported in favour of binaural hearing aids, while Hedgecock and Sheets (1958), DiCarlo and Brown (1960), and Jerger et ah (1961) did not find any significant difference between binaural and monaural hearing aid use with regard to speech facilitation.…”

Are Two Ears Not Better Than One?

“…Given the benefits of binaural listening for improving SNR, it might be expected that a binaural hearing aid fitting would result in better speech-in-noise recognition performance, when compared to a monaural fitting. Indeed, as reviewed by Ross (1980), there are several early studies that support the assumption that there will be better speech recognition performance with the use of two hearing aids as compared to one (e.g., Markle and Aber, 1958;Belzile and Markle, 1959;Wright and Carhart, 1960;Olsen and Carhart, 1967). On the other hand, there are also early studies that suggest no difference in monaural versus binaural speech recognition in noise performance (Hedgecock and Sheets, 1958;DiCarlo and Brown, 1960;Jerger and Dirks, 1961).…”

Binaural speech intelligibility in noise for hearing-impaired listeners

“…Past research on binaural speech intelligibility in noise for hearing-impaired listeners was mainly focused on clinical application as site-of-lesion test (Olsen et al, 1976;Bocca and Antonelli, 1976;Stubblefield and Goldstein, 1977), on the determination of the benefit of binaural hearing aids (Wright and Carhart, 1960;Dirks and Wilson, 1969b;Zelnick, 1970;Markides, 1977;Festen and Plomp, 1986) or on age-related effects (Tillman et al, 1973;Duquesnoy, 1983; Gelfland e! al., 1988).…”