Download or read book Suprathreshold perception in normal hearing and hearing impaired listeners written by Jan Hots and published by Logos Verlag Berlin GmbH. This book was released on 2014-08-12 with total page 142 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The perception of sound by the human auditory system is a complex process and its understanding is of major importance for many applications in our everyday life, e.g., the estimation of noise emissions, or the development of hearing aids. The mechanics of the human auditory system and the perception of sound are investigated in psychoacoustics. Psychoacoustic studies and measures help to characterize the perception of sound. The scope of this thesis is the perception of loudness and sound intensity. Loudness perception, among other aspects, depends on temporal and spectral properties of a sound. In the present thesis temporal and spectral effects of loudness as well as the changing of the perception of loudness and sound intensity in hearing-impaired listeners are investigated. Especially regarding the loudness of subcritical noise bands, the presented results are challenging for current ideas of modeling loudness perception.
Download or read book Individual Differences in Processing of Supra threshold Sound written by Dorea Ruth Ruggles and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Abstract: Normal hearing is typically defined by threshold audibility, or the loudness of sounds that an individual is able to hear. This convention exists despite the fact that everyday communication relies on extracting and interpreting features of supra-threshold sound. Many normal-hearing listeners struggle to perform certain supra-threshold auditory tasks, and debate persists as to whether such difficulties originate from deficits in cognitive processing or in peripheral, sensory encoding. In this work, we show that there are large individual differences among normal-hearing adults (18 to 55 years), who were asked to report a stream of digits located directly ahead in a simulated rectangular room. Simultaneous, competing masker digit streams were simulated at locations 15° left and right of center, and the level of reverberation was adjusted to vary task difficulty. Performance was best in the anechoic condition and worst in the high-reverberation condition, but listeners nearly always reported a digit from one of the three competing streams, showing that reverberation did not render the digits unintelligible. Most importantly, inter-subject differences were extremely large. These differences were not significantly correlated with age, memory span, or hearing status. They were, however, correlated with behavioral differences in the ability to detect small frequency modulations in pure tones and with the strength of the frequency following response (FFR), a physiological measure of spectro-temporal detail encoding in supra-threshold sounds early in the auditory pathway. The decomposition of the FFR into envelope and carrier components shows that envelope frequency following is the preferred cue for completing the spatial attention task, but it degrades with early aging. As a result, older listeners depend more on carrier phase locking cues than younger people. These results suggest that differences in peripheral encoding help explain individual differences in the ability to communicate in challenging settings, but that aging also has a separate, dissociable effect on early encoding in the auditory system. Tests like these may help tease apart contributions of peripheral and central deficits to communication impairments, ultimately leading to new approaches for helping listeners cope with complex listening environments.
Download or read book Hearing Loss written by National Research Council and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 2004-12-17 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Millions of Americans experience some degree of hearing loss. The Social Security Administration (SSA) operates programs that provide cash disability benefits to people with permanent impairments like hearing loss, if they can show that their impairments meet stringent SSA criteria and their earnings are below an SSA threshold. The National Research Council convened an expert committee at the request of the SSA to study the issues related to disability determination for people with hearing loss. This volume is the product of that study. Hearing Loss: Determining Eligibility for Social Security Benefits reviews current knowledge about hearing loss and its measurement and treatment, and provides an evaluation of the strengths and weaknesses of the current processes and criteria. It recommends changes to strengthen the disability determination process and ensure its reliability and fairness. The book addresses criteria for selection of pure tone and speech tests, guidelines for test administration, testing of hearing in noise, special issues related to testing children, and the difficulty of predicting work capacity from clinical hearing test results. It should be useful to audiologists, otolaryngologists, disability advocates, and others who are concerned with people who have hearing loss.
Download or read book Pitch Perception and Harmonic Resolvability in Normal hearing and Hearing impaired Listeners written by Joshua G. W. Bernstein and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 165 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: (cont.) However, further results in the third and fourth studies suggested a role for harmonic resolvability in pitch discrimination, inconsistent with the lack of dependence on resolvability of the modified autocorrelation model. In normal-hearing subjects at high stimulus levels and in hearing-impaired subjects, a wider spacing between adjacent frequency components, related to a reduction in frequency selectivity, was required to yield accurate FO discrimination performance. Thus, resolved harmonics may be necessary for accurate FO encoding, and the pitch discrimination deficit associated with sensorineural hearing loss may be related to a reduction in frequency selectivity. These results support spectral or spectrotemporal pitch models that derive FO from resolved harmonics, or a place-dependent temporal model whereby peripheral filter bandwidths limit the range of detectable periodicities. Because spectral processing plays an important role in pitch discrimination, hearing-impaired and cochlear-implant listeners may benefit from hearing-aid fitting procedures and cochlear-implant processing algorithms that emphasize or enhance spectral place cues.
Download or read book How and Why Does Spatial Hearing Ability Differ among Listeners What Is the Role of Learning and Multisensory Interactions written by Guillaume Andéol and published by Frontiers Media SA. This book was released on 2016-08-29 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Spatial-hearing ability has been found to vary widely across listeners. A survey of the existing auditory-space perception literature suggests that three main types of factors may account for this variability: - physical factors, e.g., acoustical characteristics related to sound-localization cues, - perceptual factors, e.g., sensory/cognitive processing, perceptual learning, multisensory interactions, - and methodological factors, e.g., differences in stimulus presentation methods across studies. However, the extent to which these–and perhaps other, still unidentified—factors actually contribute to the observed variability in spatial hearing across individuals with normal hearing or within special populations (e.g., hearing-impaired listeners) remains largely unknown. Likewise, the role of perceptual learning and multisensory interactions in the emergence of a multimodal but unified representation of “auditory space,” is still an active topic of research. A better characterization and understanding of the determinants of inter-individual variability in spatial hearing, and of its relationship with perceptual learning and multisensory interactions, would have numerous benefits. In particular, it would enhance the design of rehabilitative devices and of human-machine interfaces involving auditory, or multimodal space perception, such as virtual auditory/multimodal displays in aeronautics, or navigational aids for the visually impaired. For this Research Topic, we have considered manuscripts that: - present new methods, or review existing methods, for the study of inter-individual differences; - present new data (or review existing) data, concerning acoustical features relevant for explaining inter-individual differences in sound-localization performance; - present new (or review existing) psychophysical or neurophysiological findings concerning spatial hearing and/or auditory perceptual learning, and/or multisensory interactions in humans (normal or impaired, young or older listeners) or other species; - discuss the influence of inter-individual differences on the design and use of assistive listening devices (rehabilitation) or human-machine interfaces involving spatial hearing or multimodal perception of space (ergonomy).
Download or read book Spectral Weights Measured in Listeners with Sensorineural Hearing Loss written by Karen A. Doherty and published by . This book was released on 1994 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Physiology Psychoacoustics and Cognition in Normal and Impaired Hearing written by Pim van Dijk and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-04-14 with total page 487 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The International Symposium on Hearing is a prestigious, triennial gathering where world-class scientists present and discuss the most recent advances in the field of human and animal hearing research. The 2015 edition will particularly focus on integrative approaches linking physiological, psychophysical and cognitive aspects of normal and impaired hearing. Like previous editions, the proceedings will contain about 50 chapters ranging from basic to applied research, and of interest to neuroscientists, psychologists, audiologists, engineers, otolaryngologists, and artificial intelligence researchers.
Download or read book Auditory and Visual Cues in Speech Perception written by Donna L. Eskwitt and published by . This book was released on 1988 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book An Analysis of the Perceptual Confusions of Normal Hearing and Hearing Impaired Listeners of Speech Masked by White Noise written by Charles Edward Fankhauser and published by . This book was released on 1973 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Hearing impaired Listeners Perception of s written by Sandra Isabella Ramos and published by . This book was released on 1981 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Methods for Robust Characterization of Consonant Perception in Hearing impaired Listeners written by Woojae Han and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Individuals with {it sensorineural hearing loss} (SNHL) are prescribed hearing aids and/or a cochlear implant, based on their pure-tone threshold and speech perception scores. Although these assistive listening devices do help these individuals communicate in quiet surroundings, many still have difficulty understanding speech in noisy environments. Especially, listeners with mild-to-moderate SNHL have complained that their hearing aids do not provide enough benefit to facilitate understanding of normal speech. Why is it that the modern hearing aid, even with a high level of technology, does not produce one-hundred percent efficiency? We shall show that the current clinical measurements, which interpret the result as a mean score (e.g., pure-tone average, speech recognition threshold, AI-gram, etc.), do not deliver sufficient information about the characteristics of a SNHL listener's impairment when hearing speech, and thus, result in a poorly fitting hearing aid.\ This dissertation addressed three key questions, fundamental to clinical audiology and hearing science: (1) How well do the results of standard clinical tests predict the speech perception ability of SNHL patients? (2) Are the existing methods of hearing aid fitting (e.g., the half-gain rule, NAL-R, etc.) appropriate for modern hearing aid technology? (3) How useful are measured error patterns of speech perception in SNHL patients in addressing these perception errors?\ Four sub-studies were conducted for finding answers to the proposed questions: textbf{Study I} measured individual consonant errors to quantify how each hearing-impaired (HI) listener perceives speech sounds (e.g., high- vs. low-error consonants), and then compared the individual consonant errors to the results provided by currently used clinical measurements to ascertain the differences. The results of Study I showed that the HI ear had significant errors in receiving only a few consonants. There was a low correlation between the error rates of high-error consonants and either degree and configuration of pure-tone hearing threshold or average consonant scores. textbf{Study II} examined how reliably a CV listening test could measure a HI listener's consonant loss using only {it zero-error} (ZE) utterances (defined as utterances for which normal hearing (NH) listeners incur zero errors, citep{singh2011}) and having a statistically suitable number of presentations in CVs, in order to characterize unique HI consonant loss. We provided graphical as well as statistical analysis to see not only the error rate (%) of a target consonant but also its pattern of specific confusions. As we found in Study I, there was no measurable correlation between pure-tone threshold and the error rate, or no identification of high-error consonants in HI ears. As noise increased, the percentage of error and confusions of target consonants increased. Although some consonants showed significantly higher errors and resulted in more confusion than others, HI ears have a very different consonant confusion pattern than NH ears, which may not be either measured or analyzed by the use of average scores. Comparison between the two (separated) phases of the experiment (Exp.~II) showed a good internal consistency for all HI ears. textbf{Study III} investigated whether or not NAL-R amplification might offer a positive benefit to speech perception of each HI listener at the consonant level, i.e., differentiates consonants that are distorted with amplification from those that achieve a positive benefit from amplification. The results were then compared to the current clinical measurement to see a relation between consonants which have positive amplification benefit and hearing loss. Regardless of NAL-R amplification, HI listeners have their own consonant dependence and the dependence was not predicted by either pure-tone threshold or aided threshold. HI listeners who have symmetrical hearing loss do not have the same positive amplification benefit to the two ears. textbf{Study IV} characterized consonant perception errors of each HI listener by identifying missing critical features of misheard consonants as a function of signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), while following the same procedure (i.e., increasing the number of ZE utterance presentations up to 20) as in Study II, yet for the NAL-R amplification condition. As the noise increased, consonant error and confusions were significantly increased, although by applying gains provided by NAL-R amplification correction. The percentage of error and confusions of the target consonants were different across the HI ears, thus could not be averaged. When the results of Study IV were compared with those of Study II, a significant amplification effect is found. Generally, the percentage of error and confusions were decreased in the NAL-R condition as a function of SNRs. However, typical average analysis, using mean score and grouping the HI ears, failed to explain the idiosyncratic characteristics of HI speech perception.\ Overall, this series of studies concluded that current average measures and analyses have a serious, even fatal limitation in finding problems of HI speech perception. Therefore, we have explored the use of the nonsense CV test for as a more precise measure. We will show that this can make significant contributions to HI speech perception. We propose that this CV test and its application might be utilized in the clinical setting, to improve the diagnosis of HI speech perception. This research will help HI listeners hear day-to-day conversations more clearly, as well as aid in audiological diagnosis and successful rehabilitation to increase speech perception for HI listeners.
Download or read book Tinnitus An Interdisciplinary Approach Towards Individualized Treatment Towards Understanding the Complexity of Tinnitus written by and published by Elsevier. This book was released on 2021-04-25 with total page 560 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tinnitus - An Interdisciplinary Approach Towards Individualized Treatment: Towards Understanding the Complexity of Tinnitus, Volume 262, the latest release in the Progress in Brain Research series, highlights new advances in the field, with this new volume presenting interesting chapters on current topics such as Cochlear implantation for patients with tinnitus – a systematic review, Event Related Potentials to Assess the Tinnitus complaint during drug treatment, The difference in post-stimulus suppression between residual inhibition and forward masking, Sleep, sleep apnea and tinnitus, A Bayesian brain in imbalance: medial, lateral and descending pathways in tinnitus and pain, Tinnitus features according to caffeine consumption, and much more. - Provides the authority and expertise of leading contributors from an international board of authors - Presents the latest release in the Progress in Brain Research series - Includes the latest information on Tinnitus and its complexity
Download or read book Perception of Consonant Voicing Cues written by Lisa D. Holden and published by . This book was released on 1981 with total page 6 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Pure Tone Pitch Perception in Low frequency Hearing Loss written by Christopher William Turner and published by . This book was released on 1982 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Perception of Periodicity Pitch in Hearing Impaired Listeners written by George O'Neill Purvis and published by . This book was released on 1973 with total page 74 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Processing of relevant characteristics of complex sounds in normal hearing listeners and cochlear implant users written by Wiebke Heeren and published by Logos Verlag Berlin GmbH. This book was released on 2015-06-15 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The auditory processing of complex signals is not yet fully understood making a clearer insight into auditory system processes worth aspiring to. One approach for this purpose is to gain a better understanding of the relations between physical parameters and hearing sensations by means of psychoacoustics. Suitable measures such as loudness help to characterize the perception of sound leading to more sophisticated loudness models which could be useful in optimizing hearing devices such as cochlear implants. The scope of this thesis therefore is the suprathreshold perception of sounds with different spectral, temporal and spatial content in normal-hearing listeners and cochlear implant users. Among others, this covers the applicability of categorical loudness scaling as a fast procedure to assess partial loudness as well as binaural and spatial hearing in cochlear implant users in a free-field measurement setup providing realistic spatial cues.
Download or read book An Experimental Investigation of Speech Perception Among Normally Hearing and Hearing handicapped Brain injured Children written by Howard Alan Grey and published by . This book was released on 1963 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
