An auditory-periphery model of the effects of acoustic trauma on auditory nerve responses.

Acoustic trauma degrades the auditory nerve's tonotopic representation of acoustic stimuli. Recent physiological studies have quantified the degradation in responses to the vowel /E/ and have investigated amplification schemes designed to restore a more correct tonotopic representation than is achieved with conventional hearing aids. However, it is difficult from the data to quantify how much different aspects of the cochlear pathology contribute to the impaired responses.

Biological basis of hearing-aid design.

We show that we can accurately model the auditory-nerve discharge patterns in response to sounds as complex as speech and ask how we may exploit this knowledge to test new strategies for hearing-aid signal processing. We describe the auditory-nerve representations of vowels in normal and noise-damaged ears. The normal representations are predicted well by a cochlear signal processing model originally developed by Carney (Carney, L.