Auditory Comprehension in School-Aged Children With Normal Hearing and With Unilateral Hearing Loss.

Purpose The purpose of this study was to measure auditory comprehension performance in school-aged children with unilateral hearing loss (UHL) and with normal hearing (NH) in quiet and in the presence of child-produced two-talker babble (TTB). Method Listeners were school-aged children (7-12 years) with permanent UHL ( = 25) or NH ( = 14). Comprehension of three short stories taken from the Test of Narrative Language (Gillam & Pearson, 2004) was measured in quiet and in the presence of TTB at two signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs): (a) +6 dB and (b) the individualized SNR required to achieve 50% sentence understanding in the presence of the same TTB masker in a prior study (Griffin, Poissant, & Freyman, 2019).

Word Identification With Temporally Interleaved Competing Sounds by Younger and Older Adult Listeners.

Objectives: The purpose of this experiment was to contribute to our understanding of the nature of age-related changes in competing speech perception using a temporally interleaved task.

Design: Younger and older adults (n = 16/group) participated in this study. The target was a five-word sentence.

Speech-in-Noise and Quality-of-Life Measures in School-Aged Children With Normal Hearing and With Unilateral Hearing Loss.

Objectives: (1) Measure sentence recognition in co-located and spatially separated target and masker configurations in school-aged children with unilateral hearing loss (UHL) and with normal hearing (NH). (2) Compare self-reported hearing-related quality-of-life (QoL) scores in school-aged children with UHL and NH.

Design: Listeners were school-aged children (6 to 12 yrs) with permanent UHL (n = 41) or NH (n = 35) and adults with NH (n = 23).

Determining cochlear implant users' true noise tolerance: use of speech reception threshold in noise testing.

Objective: The speech perception abilities of cochlear implant (CI) recipients have significantly improved over the past decade. At the same time, clinical test batteries to measure their performance in noise remain mostly unchanged, resulting in ceiling-level performance for the most successful recipients. The goal of this study is to determine the true noise tolerance abilities of CI recipients using adaptive speech reception threshold (SRT) in noise testing.

Characteristics of noise exposure during solitary trumpet playing: immediate impact on distortion-product otoacoustic emissions and long-term implications for hearing.

Objectives: The objectives of this investigation were to quantify noise exposures generated during a 1 hr trumpet practice session and to determine whether distortion-product otoacoustic emissions (DPOAEs) are affected by such exposure, to describe the distribution of intensity levels and temporal characteristics of noise produced by trumpet practice, and to determine the effect of earplug use on generated noise levels and DPOAEs.

Design: In experiment 1, eight college-age trumpeters underwent an otoscopic inspection, tympanometry, and pure-tone threshold testing. Using a Grason-Stadler 60 DPOAE system, DPOAEs were recorded just before a 1 hr practice session, at 2 min after the practice session, 4 min after the session, and at 4 min intervals thereafter for a total period of 1 hr.

Effects of source-to-listener distance and masking on perception of cochlear implant processed speech in reverberant rooms.

Two experiments examined the effects of source-to-listener distance (SLD) on sentence recognition in simulations of cochlear implant usage in noisy, reverberant rooms. Experiment 1 tested sentence recognition for three locations in the reverberant field of a small classroom (volume=79.2 m(3)).

A predictive model of cochlear implant performance in postlingually deafened adults.

Objective: To develop a predictive model of cochlear implant (CI) performance in postlingually deafened adults that includes contemporary speech perception testing and the hearing history of both ears.

Study Design: Retrospective clinical study. Multivariate predictors of speech perception after CI surgery included duration of any degree of hearing loss (HL), duration of severe-to-profound HL, age at implantation, and preoperative Hearing in Noise Test (HINT) sentences in quiet and HINT sentences in noise scores.

Impact of cochlear implantation on speech understanding, depression, and loneliness in the elderly.

Objective: To compare speech understanding ability, the level of depression, and the degree of loneliness experienced by elderly cochlear implant (CI) users (>or= 70 years), adult CI users (or= 70 years).

Design: Clinical study.

Setting: Tertiary academic neuro-otologic and audiologic centre.

Speech intelligibility in cochlear implant simulations: Effects of carrier type, interfering noise, and subject experience.

Channel vocoders using either tone or band-limited noise carriers have been used in experiments to simulate cochlear implant processing in normal-hearing listeners. Previous results from these experiments have suggested that the two vocoder types produce speech of nearly equal intelligibility in quiet conditions. The purpose of this study was to further compare the performance of tone and noise-band vocoders in both quiet and noisy listening conditions.

Effects of reverberation and masking on speech intelligibility in cochlear implant simulations.

Two experiments investigated the impact of reverberation and masking on speech understanding using cochlear implant (CI) simulations. Experiment 1 tested sentence recognition in quiet. Stimuli were processed with reverberation simulation (T=0.

Acoustic and perceptual appraisal of speech production in pediatric cochlear implant users.

Objective: The purpose of the present study was to examine the relationship between objectively measurable acoustic changes in speech production and subjective speech production accuracy and perceived intelligibility immediately following a disruption in auditory feedback normally provided to subjects from a cochlear implant.

Methods: Six children with profound sensorineural hearing loss participated in the study. Their task was to produce speech samples in two conditions: (1) with auditory feedback from their cochlear implants, and (2) without auditory feedback from their cochlear implants.

Cochlear implantation in a patient with neurofibromatosis type 1 and profound hearing loss: evidence to support a cochlear site of lesion.

Objective: To determine the efficacy of cochlear implantation in an individual with neurofibromatosis type 1 and profound hearing loss and to determine, to the extent possible in a living subject, the site of lesion of the hearing loss in an individual with neurofibromatosis type 1.

Study Design: Postoperative assessment of an adult male with neurofibromatosis type 1.

Setting: The study was completed in the Departments of Otolaryngology and Audiology, University of Massachusetts Medical Center, Massachusetts.