Objectives: This study was a continuation of work on an explore-and-select approach to the self-adjustment of amplification. Goals were to determine (i) the effect of changing the number of adjustment controls from three to two, (ii) the effect of changing the initial adjustment from overall output to high-frequency output, (iii) individual repeatability, (iv) the effect on phoneme recognition of increasing and decreasing overall output relative to the starting and adjusted conditions, and (v) listener reactions to, and opinions of, the self-adjustment procedure.
Design: Twenty-two adults with hearing loss, 10 of whom were hearing aid users, adjusted level and spectrum of connected speech to preference, using three configurations of number and order of adjustment parameters.
Objective: The objective was to determine the relative contribution of four criteria (loudness, annoyance, distraction, speech interference) to participants' noise-tolerance thresholds (NTT).
Design: While listening to speech in noise set at the highest signal-to-noise ratio at which noise became unacceptable (noise tolerance threshold), participants completed paired-comparison judgments of loudness, annoyance, distraction, and speech interference to determine the noise domain(s) that were most important in their noise tolerance judgments. Participants also completed absolute ratings of the noise using the same noise domains, which were combined with the paired comparison data for analysis.
While listening to recorded sentences with a sound-field level of 65 dB SPL, 24 adults with hearing-aid experience used the "Goldilocks" explore-and-select procedure to adjust level and spectrum of amplified speech to preference. All participants started adjustment from the same generic response. Amplification was provided by a custom-built Master Hearing Aid with online processing of microphone input.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPurpose: This paper consists of 2 parts. The purpose of Part 1 was to review the potential influence of internal (person-related) factors on listening effort. The purpose of Part 2 was to present, in support of Part 1, preliminary data illustrating the interactive effects of an external factor (task demand) and an internal factor (evaluative threat) on autonomic nervous system measures.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe Fifth Eriksholm Workshop on "Hearing Impairment and Cognitive Energy" was convened to develop a consensus among interdisciplinary experts about what is known on the topic, gaps in knowledge, the use of terminology, priorities for future research, and implications for practice. The general term cognitive energy was chosen to facilitate the broadest possible discussion of the topic. It goes back to who described the effects of attention on perception; he used the term psychic energy for the notion that limited mental resources can be flexibly allocated among perceptual and mental activities.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCognitive and emotional challenges may elicit a physiological stress response that can include arousal of the sympathetic nervous system (fight or flight response) and withdrawal of the parasympathetic nervous system (responsible for recovery and rest). This article reviews studies that have used measures of electrodermal activity (skin conductance) and heart rate variability (HRV) to index sympathetic and parasympathetic activity during auditory tasks. In addition, the authors present results from a new study with normal-hearing listeners examining the effects of speaking rate on changes in skin conductance and high-frequency HRV (HF-HRV).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjective: The purpose of the study was to determine the effects of hearing loss and noise on (1) two autonomic nervous system measures associated with stress (skin conductance and heart rate variability) and on (2) subjective ratings of workload/stress. The authors hypothesized that hearing loss would increase psychophysiological and subjective reactivity to noise during speech recognition tasks. Both psychophysiological and subjective indicators of workload/stress were expected to increase with a reduction in signal-to-noise ratio.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe purpose was to determine the effect of hearing loss on the ability to separate competing talkers using talker differences in fundamental frequency (F0) and apparent vocal-tract length (VTL). Performance of 13 adults with hearing loss and 6 adults with normal hearing was measured using the Coordinate Response Measure. For listeners with hearing loss, the speech was amplified and filtered according to the NAL-RP hearing aid prescription.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Am Acad Audiol
February 2011
Background: The effects of noise and other competing backgrounds on speech recognition performance are well documented. There is less information, however, on listening effort and stress experienced by listeners during a speech-recognition task that requires inhibition of competing sounds.
Purpose: The purpose was (a) to determine if psychophysiological indexes of listening effort were more sensitive than performance measures (percentage correct) obtained near ceiling level during a competing speech task, (b) to determine the relative sensitivity of four psychophysiological measures to changes in task demand, and (c) to determine the relationships between changes in psychophysiological measures and changes in subjective ratings of stress and workload.
Purpose: To compare multichannel amplification within a cellular phone system to a standard cellular phone response.
Research Design: Three cellular phone speech-encoding strategies were evaluated: a narrow-band (3.5 kHz upper cutoff) enhanced variable-rate coder (EVRC), a narrow-band selectable mode vocoder (SMV), and a wide-band SMV (7.
Background: While testing suprathreshold word recognition at multiple levels is considered best practice, studies on practice patterns do not suggest that this is common practice. Audiologists often test at a presentation level intended to maximize recognition scores, but methods for selecting this level are not well established for a wide range of hearing losses.
Purpose: To determine the presentation level methods that resulted in maximum suprathreshold phoneme-recognition scores while avoiding loudness discomfort.
J Am Acad Audiol
June 2007
The purpose of this study was to evaluate a clinical protocol for setting hearing aid maximum output (MPO) in adult users. The protocol consisted of matching prescriptive targets for MPO followed by aided loudness validation and adjustment. Twenty-eight adults fit with multichannel hearing aids during the previous two years were recalled for unaided loudness measures.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Speech Lang Hear Res
June 2007
Purpose: The purposes were (a) to compare masking of consonant bursts by adjacent vowels for listeners with and without hearing loss and (b) to determine the extent to which the temporal intraspeech masking can be reduced by a simulated hearing-aid frequency-response shaping.
Method: Fourteen adults with sensorineural hearing loss and 10 with normal hearing participated. Seven of the participants with hearing loss had flat or gradually sloping audiograms, and 7 had steeply sloping losses.
The purpose of this study was to compare threshold-matched ears with and without suspected cochlear dead regions in terms of the speech perception benefit from high-frequency amplification. The Threshold Equalizing Noise Test (TEN) was used to assess the presence of dead regions. Speech perception was measured while participants were wearing a hearing aid fit to approximate DSL[i/o] targets.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Speech Lang Hear Res
August 2003
The purpose of this paper was to examine the relations between the ability to separate simultaneous sentences spoken by talkers of different gender and the ability to separate pitch patterns in a sequential stream segregation task. Simultaneous sentence pairs consisting of 1 sentence spoken by a male talker and 1 sentence spoken by a female talker were presented to 11 listeners with sensorineural hearing loss. Listeners were asked to repeat both sentences and were scored on the number of words repeated correctly.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF© LitMetric 2025. All rights reserved.