Own voice qualities (OVQ) in hearing-aid users: there is more than just occlusion.

Objective: Hearing-aid users' problems with their own voice caused by occlusion are well known. Conversely, it remains essentially undocumented whether hearing-aid users expected not to have occlusion-related problems experience own-voice issues.

Design: To investigate this topic, a dedicated Own Voice Qualities (OVQ) questionnaire was developed and used in two experiments with stratified samples.

Study Sample: In the main experiment, the OVQ was administered to 169 hearing-aid users (most of whom were expected not to have occlusion-related problems) and to a control group of 56 normally-hearing people. In the follow-up experiment, the OVQ was used in a cross-over study where 43 hearing-aid users rated own voice for an open fitting and a small-vent earmould fitting.

Results: The results from the main experiment show that hearing-aid users (without occlusion) have more problems than the normal-hearing controls on several dimensions of own voice. The magnitude of these differences was found to be generally larger than the differences observed between the open fitting and the small-vent fitting in the follow-up experiment.

Conclusions: This suggests that own voice is a potentially important concern, even for hearing-aid users who are not expected to have occlusion-related problems.