Audio‐visual integration in listeners with normal hearing and hearing aid users

In listeners with normal hearing, the sight of a speaker’s face articulating a syllable can influence the auditory percept, most observably when the auditory and visual stimuli are different from one another. This study investigates differences in audio‐visual (AV) integration (‘‘the McGurk effect’’) between adults with hearing loss who wear hearing aids (HA) and their normal‐hearing (NH) counterparts. The following hypothesis is being tested: HA users will rely more on visual input and thus be biased more toward the visual stimulus in the mismatch condition. Audio‐visual stimuli from three speakers are presented, pairing the consonants /b/, /d/, and /g/ with the vowels /a/, /i/, and /u/, in three conditions (auditory‐only, visual‐only, and AV) to the two subject groups, NH and HA. Participants label each stimulus according to the consonant perceived. Responses are coded into four categories: fusion, combination, auditory, or visual. Data analysis examines the relative strength of visual influences in the two groups. Pilot data show fusion and visual bias in an HA user. Further results will be presented. [Work supported by NIH.]