A Clinical Evaluation of Adaptive Hearing Aid Compression: Exploring its Impact on the Word Recognition Abilities of Spanish Pediatric Hearing Aid Users

As hearing care professionals, we want children with hearing loss to have the best access to sound in their daily environments. This means their amplification must provide good audibility for speech in quiet, and in complex, noisy environments. Traditional pediatric hearing instruments have utilized Wide Dynamic Range Compression (WDRC) hearing aid processing for the management of soft, average, and loud sounds. This was considered important as young children with hearing loss may not have the ability to adjust their hearing aids and control for sounds that may become uncomfortably loud [1]. Using fixed attack and release times, WDRC can manage a broad range of input levels to the hearing aids. Unfortunately, there are limitations with WDRC. Slow acting WDRC may not provide access to quiet sounds, when followed by those that are loud; while fast acting WDRC may cause distortion, giving speech an unnatural quality and the listener perceives the sounds as “noisy” [2].