Marshall Chasin
TORONTO–Marshall Chasin, AuD, MSc, editor of the Hear the Music section of hearinghealthmatters.org, will present a course at Audiology Online on hearing aid fittings that will debut on September 28. Chasin is also director of research at the Musicians’ Clinics of Canada.
Entitled “Hearing Aid Fittings: Different Programs for Different Languages,” the course will discuss how linguistic variations may require audiologists to use different methods for fitting hearing aids depending on which language the patient converses in.
For example, Chasin says, languages that use a subject-object-verb (SOV) syntactic word order (e.g., Hindi, Urdu, Korean, Japanese, Turkish, and Iranian) require more hearing aid gain for softer (sentence final) level inputs than do languages, such as English, that use a subject-verb-object (SVO) word order.
These differences, says Chasin, would not show up on the language-specific measures of the Speech Intelligibility Index (SII), which is used widely as a measure to evaluate optimal hearing aid performance.
Chasin will examine ways to use separate programs in fitting hearing aids on a person who will be using them for hearing multiple languages. For example, program #1 can be set for English and program #2 for a second spoken language with different characteristics.
To register for the course, go to www.audiologyonline.com/ceus/livecoursedetails.asp?class_id=19003.
