난청인은 난청의 정도, 종류, 유형에 따라 각기 다른 정도의 의사소통의 한계를 가질 수 있고 더 나아가 사회적인 고립, 소외감, 열등감 등의 다양한 심리적인 문제까지도 경험할 수 있다. 특히 난청아동의 경우 난청이 단순히 듣지 못함의 문제를 유발할 뿐 아니라 언어, 지각, 인지 능력 등의 저하로 연결되어 더 복합적인 문제가 유발될 수 있다. 따라서 많은 청각장애인들은 원활한 의사소통 및 사회생활을 위해 보청기라는 보조기기의 도움을 받아 소리를 증폭해 들음으로써 도움을 받으며 살아가고 있다. 하지만 고심도 난청인에게는 보청기의 이득이 제한적일 수 있어 최근
The present study examined performance of 10 normal-hearing listeners (control group) and 10 cochlear implant (CI) users who had CI on one ear and HA on the opposite ear (CI+HA) in order to investigate the amount of binaural benefit on K-HINT (Korea-Hearing in Noise threshold) test. Additionally, a K-SSQ (SSQ translated in Korean) survey was also conducted to all CI participants in order to evaluate their subjective benefit from the use of CI+HA. Results of the K-HINT test for YNH and CI participants were as follows. For YHN listeners, -7.2 dB SNR, on average, was required to identify K-HINT sentences by 50%. For CI users, 15.32 dB SNR was needed for 50% of K-HINT sentence identification during CI-only listening condition whereas 11.82 dB SNR was required for 50% of K-HINT sentence identification during CI+HA listening condition. CI users’ binaural benefits calculated from K-HINT results were 4.6 dB signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), 3.4 dB SNR, and 3.8 dB SNR for head shadow effect, binaural squelch, binaural summation effects, respectively. Results of K-SSQ survey suggested that the degree of satisfaction was around 62%, regardless of three sections (speech, spatial and quality) in K-SSQ. CI users recieved a significant benefit from binaural use (CI+HA), regardless of the direction of noise. KEY WORDS：Binaural benefit·CI+HA·K-HINT·K-SSQ
INTRODUCTION MATERIALS AND METHODS RESULTS DISCUSSIONS CONCLUSIONS REFERENCES Appendix
