A comparison of auditory brain stem responses elicited by click and chirp stimuli in adults with normal hearing and sensory hearing loss.

Objectives: The aim of this study was to compare the human auditory brain stem response (ABR) elicited by clicks and chirps with overall behavioral hearing thresholds in participants with normal hearing and with sensory hearing loss. The authors hypothesized that ABRs to chirps would be more robust and that thresholds would be more similar to overall behavioral hearing thresholds compared with ABRs to clicks.

Design: Twenty-five adults with normal hearing and 25 adults with sensory hearing loss were recruited.

Human sensitivity to differences in the rate of auditory cue change.

Measurement of sensitivity to differences in the rate of change of auditory signal parameters is complicated by confounds among duration, extent, and velocity of the changing signal. Dooley and Moore [(1988) J. Acoust.

Auditory perception of motor vehicle travel paths.

Objective: These experiments address concerns that motor vehicles in electric engine mode are so quiet that they pose a risk to pedestrians, especially those with visual impairments.

Background: The "quiet car" issue has focused on hybrid and electric vehicles, although it also applies to internal combustion engine vehicles. Previous research has focused on detectability of vehicles, mostly in quiet settings.

Input and output compensation for the cochlear traveling wave delay in wide-band ABR recordings: implications for small acoustic tumor detection.

Background: The Stacked ABR (auditory brainstem response) attempts at the output of the auditory periphery to compensate for the temporal dispersion of neural activation caused by the cochlear traveling wave in response to click stimulation. Compensation can also be made at the input by using a chirp stimulus. It has been demonstrated that the Stacked ABR is sensitive to small tumors that are often missed by standard ABR latency measures.

Factors that allow a high level of speech understanding by patients fit with cochlear implants.

Three factors account for the high level of speech understanding in quiet enjoyed by many patients fit with cochlear implants. First, some information about speech exists in the time/amplitude envelope of speech. This information is sufficient to narrow the number of word candidates for a given signal.

A comparison of the speech understanding provided by acoustic models of fixed-channel and channel-picking signal processors for cochlear implants.

Vowels, consonants, and sentences were processed by two cochlear-implant signal-processing strategies-a fixed-channel strategy and a channel-picking strategy-and the resulting signals were presented to listeners with normal hearing for identification. At issue was the number of channels of stimulation needed in each strategy to achieve an equivalent level of speech recognition in quiet and in noise. In quiet, 8 fixed channels allowed a performance maximum for the most difficult stimulus material.