How hidden is hidden hearing loss? Self-reported listening problems in charcot Marie tooth disease.

Introduction: Laboratory studies have revealed hidden hearing loss in patients with Charcot-Marie-Tooth (CMT) disease, the most prevalent inherited neuropathy, which may impact their quality of life. The current study distinguished between CMT type 1, which involves demyelination of the peripheral nerves, and type 2, which concerns dysfunction of peripheral nerves due to axonopathy. The self-reported effects were investigated of CMT1 and CMT2 on listening problems and related social and attentional problems in everyday communicative situations.

The role of segmental and durational cues in the processing of reduced words.

In natural conversations, words are generally shorter and they often lack segments. It is unclear to what extent such durational and segmental reductions affect word recognition. The present study investigates to what extent reduction in the initial syllable hinders word comprehension, which types of segments listeners mostly rely on, and whether listeners use word duration as a cue in word recognition.

Semantic context effects in the comprehension of reduced pronunciation variants.

Listeners require context to understand the highly reduced words that occur in casual speech. The present study reports four auditory lexical decision experiments in which the role of semantic context in the comprehension of reduced versus unreduced speech was investigated. Experiments 1 and 2 showed semantic priming for combinations of unreduced, but not reduced, primes and low-frequency targets.