Noise Reduction Preferences in Teenagers and Pre-teens

Participant will rate perceived listening effort during a speech in noise task with different levels of noise reduction. Participants will rate how easy the task seemed using a sliding scale with 100 increments between two verbal anchors: "it was very easy" to "it was not easy at all". Higher scores indicate higher perceived listening effort. A rating of "0" would indicate "it was very easy" to understand the speech while a rating of "100" would indicate "it was not easy at all" to understand the speech.

The signal to noise ratio in which participant can correctly repeat 50% of key words at different levels of noise reduction, known as SNR50. A lower number is better, as it indicates that the words do not have to be presented at a much higher level than the noise in order for the person to understand 50% of the words. For example, an SNR of 2 dB means that the words are 2 dB louder than the noise, and SNR of 0 dB means that the words and the noise are at the same level, etc.

Length of time(in milliseconds) it takes participant to respond physically by pressing a button while also performing a verbal task. Participants repeat the word they hear, while at the same time, are instructed to press a button if the word they hear is an object "bigger than a basketball". A higher response time may indicate increased listening effort.

A blinded paired comparison between two different settings of noise reduction (NR), while listening to a story presented in noise. Participants indicate whether they prefer listening to setting "A" or setting "B". Investigator will switch the settings so that participant is not aware of what the settings are. There will be a total of 18 trials; 12 which will compare OFF to either WEAK or STRONG, and six trials will compare WEAK to STRONG. The preferred setting will be determined by counting which setting is chosen most often from those six trials. The outcome measure data will report a count of participants who preferred OFF to their chosen setting, who preferred their chosen setting to OFF, and those who chose OFF and their preferred setting an equal number of times.

Subjective questionnaire about streaming access preferences. Participants will indicate which method (Hearing aid push button, phone control, or tap control on hearing aid) for answering phone calls and listening to audio streaming on phone.

Out of 25 monosyllabic words presented in noise at different levels of noise reduction, the number of words the participant correctly repeats,while also performing a visual task. No statistical analysis was performed for this test.