The better-ear advantage alone yields an 8 dB SRT benefit worth 56 percentage points

Evidence

Experiments that quantify the better-ear advantage are often conducted using headphones but with recordings obtained from the free-field environment, as ear-specific measures are necessary to quantify the better-ear advantage. Recordings are made at each ear and then played over the right and left earphones separately. Thresholds (or identification scores) for each ear are then obtained. The better-ear effect is then calculated by subtracting the performance scores between the two ears. Following this type of procedure, Bronkhorst and Plomp (1988) measured speech-recognition thresholds (SRTs — the dB level at which words are identified 50% of the time) and found an 8 dB benefit from the better-ear advantage. For reference, an 8-dB improvement in SRT can correspond to an increase of 56 percentage points for word identification (e.g., Duquesnoy, 1983). For someone communicating in a noisy environment, this effect alone could be the difference between participating in a conversation or not. Because the better-ear effect is a purely acoustic effect, listeners can take direct advantage of it by strategic placement of their physical location with respect to people talking and the noise sources when listening in complicated environments. — Jennifer Lentz, Psychoacoustics- Perception of Normal…, 1546

Categorization

• SHARE: An 8-dB SRT improvement translating to 56 percentage points of word identification is a striking, concrete number for anyone in audiology.
• ADDENDUM: Strategic placement of one’s body relative to talkers and noise sources is a practical binaural-listening tactic usable in a hearing-care context.