Erik Jorgensen, AuD, PhD, CCC-A,
Assistant Professor, Dept. of Communication Sciences & Disorders
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Some effects of hearing loss and hearing aids on environmental soundscape perception
Hearing aid users commonly report changes in environmental soundscape perception following hearing aid fitting, yet little work has systematically addressed how hearing loss and amplification alter the subjective experience of everyday sounds. We present a series of experiments examining these effects using perceptual attributes drawn from the international standard soundscape model. Participants rated sounds along these attributes across several contexts: single sounds evaluated in the lab and in the real world, and a variety of virtual urban soundscapes evaluated in the lab. Results indicate that listeners with hearing loss rate environmental sounds less positively than listeners with normal hearing across attributes. Hearing aids partially restore these ratings, though effect sizes are modest. We also examine the relative contributions of acoustic signal properties and semantic sound knowledge to attribute ratings. Together, these findings lay groundwork for understanding how hearing loss and amplification shape everyday soundscape perception, and demonstrate complementary methodological approaches for investigating these effects.