Tolerable delay for speech production and perception: effects of hearing ability and experience with hearing aids

Summary

Measured how much processing delay listeners with and without hearing loss tolerate for their own voice and for an external voice.

Key findings

• 20 listeners with normal hearing and 20 with mild to moderate hearing loss rated their annoyance, on a 7-point scale, at processing delays up to 50 ms in own-voice and external-voice conditions.
• Listeners with hearing loss tolerated significantly more delay in two of three voice conditions, and the more hearing loss a listener had, the less their annoyance rose as the delay increased.
• Experienced hearing-aid users showed a small trend toward tolerating more delay than new users, which was not significant.

Limits

Annoyance ratings with a laboratory processing setup that the authors say differed from commercial hearing aids. It does not test an assistive-listening stream that arrives before the room sound.

Read the original

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28838277

Link checked 9 October 2026. We link to the original and do not host copies.

Cited in

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