Telephone use and the factors influencing it among cochlear implant patients.

Objective: To investigate telephone use in cochlear implant patients and to determine factors most likely to influence telephone use.

Methods: Surveys were mailed to 504 cochlear implant patients treated at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Hospital.

Results: Two hundred four patients returned surveys (49%), 87% were classified as telephone users.

Qualitative case studies of five cochlear implant recipients' experience with music.

Cochlear implantation has revolutionized the management of those who suffer from severe-to-profound hearing loss because many patients now achieve excellent speech understanding with objective testing. Nevertheless, speech understanding in noisy conditions and music appreciation remain significant challenges to cochlear implant (CI) users. Music appreciation is an extremely complex experience that is difficult to quantify through a conventional outcome study.

A comparison of postcochlear implantation speech scores in an adult population.

Objectives: The vast majority of cochlear implant recipients realize significant improvement in speech perception. However, there continue to be a small group that does not realize such a benefit. In an effort to identify possible predictors for this, we have compared pre- and postimplant audiologic data using Hearing In Noise Test (HINT), City University of New York (CUNY), or Central Institute for the Deaf (CID) scores for 445 consecutive English-speaking adult patients followed for a minimum of 1 year postimplantation in two distinct groups, poor versus excellent performers.

Bone-conduction hearing and the occlusion effect in otosclerosis and normal controls.

Objective: The goal of this study was to better understand bone-conduction hearing in subjects with normal hearing and in those with otosclerosis through the occlusion effect. With this study, the authors hope to lend credence to commonly accepted theories of bone-conduction hearing and the effect of lateralization during the Weber tuning fork test.

Background: There are three accepted theories defining bone-conduction hearing: compressional bone conduction describes an auditory percept produced by the compression and expansion of the cochlea leading to basilar membrane vibration; inertial bone conduction describes the inertia of the ossicular chain as a result of skull vibration during bone conduction testing; whereas skull vibration may also be transmitted to the external auditory canal, surrounding soft tissues, and para-auditory structures to illicit tympanic membrane vibration known as osseotympanic bone conduction.

Aging: a switch from automatic to controlled processing of sounds?

In this article, the authors show that aging differentially affects peoples' ability to automatically and voluntarily process auditory information. Young, middle-aged, and older adults matched behaviorally in an auditory discrimination task showed similar patterns of neural activity indexing the voluntary and conscious detection of deviant (i.e.

Evaluation of the high-resolution speech coding strategy for the Clarion CII cochlear implant system.

Four postlinguistically deafened adults were implanted with the Clarion CII cochlear implant with the HiFocus II electrode in an evaluation of performance with a new speech coding strategy (high resolution) compared with current speech coding strategies (multiple pulsatile sampler, continuous interleaved sampling, and simultaneous analog stimulation). These strategies were implemented in the Platinum speech processor from Advanced Bionics Corporation (Sylmar, CA). Postoperatively, subjects were fitted with the traditional coding strategies and over the first month were allowed to determine their strategy of choice.

Aging and the processing of sound duration in human auditory cortex.

Age-related declines in coding the fine temporal structure of acoustic signals is proposed to play a critical role in the speech perception difficulties commonly observed in older individuals. This hypothesis was tested by measuring auditory evoked potentials elicited by sounds of various durations in young, middle-aged and older adults. All stimuli generated N1 and P2 waves that peaked at about 104 and 200 ms post-stimulus onset.

Speech coding strategies and revised cochlear implant candidacy: an analysis of post-implant performance.

Objective: Technological advances in cochlear implant systems on which a sequence of speech coding strategies have been implemented seem to have resulted in improved speech perception. However, changing selection criteria for implantation have coincided with evolving technology and may confound post-implantation speech perception performance. This study compares speech coding strategy with speech perception performance in severe and profound postlingually deafened adults using one of three successive generations of Nucleus Cochlear Implant speech processors (i.

Estimating the audiogram using multiple auditory steady-state responses.

Multiple auditory steady-state responses were evoked by eight tonal stimuli (four per ear), with each stimulus simultaneously modulated in both amplitude and frequency. The modulation frequencies varied from 80 to 95 Hz and the carrier frequencies were 500, 1000, 2000, and 4000 Hz. For air conduction, the differences between physiologic thresholds for these mixed-modulation (MM) stimuli and behavioral thresholds for pure tones in 31 adult subjects with a sensorineural hearing impairment and 14 adult subjects with normal hearing were 14+/-11, 5+/-9, 5+/-9, and 9+/-10 dB (correlation coefficients .