1  National Acoustic Laboratories, Australian Hearing

2  St Gabriel's School for Hearing-impaired Children

It is important to optimise hearing aid fitting for hearing impaired children who have to rely on amplification for acquiring speech and language. Although the NAL formula has been validated to provide appropriate frequency response and gain on average, our research has indicated that a small proportion of children will hear speech better with some variations from the prescription. A paired comparison procedure has been developed for fine tuning hearing aids for individuals, but this cannot be carried out reliably with children under 6 years of age. We therefore need a method to evaluate hearing aid frequency response for young children. This paper describes a systematic use of parent and teacher observations of children's auditory performance for hearing aid evaluation. Two sets of questionnaires have been developed, and trialed with
7 older severely/profoundly hearing impaired children. The children completed three home trials each of three different hearing aid gain-frequency response settings, and parents and teachers were interviewed to assess each child's performance when using each alternative setting. The questionnaire results were related to paired comparison preferences and phoneme identification scores obtained for each child. The usefulness of the functional assessment approach for evaluating hearing aids for young children will be discussed.