This study established a normal middle ear resonance estimated from sweep frequency tympanometry, established normal equivalent ear canal volume, static acoustic admittance, and tympanometric peak pressure at 226 hertz in 90 children with normal hearing and 68 children with deafness, ages 6-15. No significant intergroup or age differences were…

Auditory filter widths for six groups of subjects, adults and children, were tested with fixed signal level (psychophysical tuning curve procedure) and fixed masker (notched noise procedure). Found that auditory filter widths from ages six to adult were not significantly different, and auditory deficits that appear as a function of age likely…

This study examined whether a divided-attention, sentence recall task was more sensitive to distortion of the speech signal than a conventional focused-attention task with 18 normal hearing listeners. The study concluded that the simultaneous-sentence test, in its present form, is not more sensitive to the effects of peak clipping than is a…

The human peripheral auditory system is fully developed at birth; however, myelination continues for several years in the higher auditory pathways. The aim of the present study was to assess the maturation course of the frequency and duration pattern tests and the middle latency response (MLR). One hundred and fifty normal participants ranging…

Hearing, impedance, and otoscopic examinations were performed on 30 elementary school children with Downs syndrome and 30 children without Downs syndrome matched for CA and IQ. Results indicated that the children with Downs syndrome had a significantly higher prevalence of hearing impairment and otologic disorders. (Author/CL)

Determines whether an averaged evoked potential technique using a random-v-repetitive presentation mode could be used to study infant auditory discrimination. Results showed a main effect of presentation mode with shorter latency for random v repetitive. The shortest onset latency was for random stimulus at the fast rate. (Author/DB)

Focuses on auditory fusion (defined in terms of a listerner's ability to distinguish paired acoustic events from single acoustic events) in 3- to 12-year-old children. The subjects listened to 270 pairs of tones controlled for frequency, intensity, and duration. (CM)

Three experiments investigated four-month-old infants' capacity to perceive bimodally specified events by detecting the temporal synchrony of sound bursts with the visable impacts of surfaces. (Author/SS)

Materials from the Northwestern University Auditory Test Number 6, spoken by a female speaker, were passed through a low-frequency notch filter, reducing the amplitude range within the spectrum. Data obtained from 12 normal-hearing listeners in filtered and unfiltered conditions demonstrated that alterations to words spoken by the same speaker…

This study of 14 children (ages 5-9) with a history of otitis media with effusion found that subjects had significantly reduced masking-level differences (MLD) compared to controls. Results suggest that the reduction in MLD may be related to abnormal brainstem processing. (Author/JDD)

The relationship between intraphonemic perception and identification of distorted /r/ was tested using nine graduate students in speech-language pathology with no known speech or hearing disorders. Laboratory training was found not to improve the identification of distorted /r/. Identification ability was related more to discrimination of /t-d/…

A two-microphone adaptive digital noise cancellation technique improved word-recognition ability for 20 normal and 12 hearing-impaired adults by reducing multitalker speech babble and speech spectrum noise 18-22 dB. Word recognition improvements averaged 37-50 percent for normal and 27-40 percent for hearing-impaired subjects. Improvement was best…

The study evaluated a distinctive feature scoring technique for List 1 of the California Consonant Test for the purpose of improving test reliability in this test used to identify errors in speech recognition made by adult listeners (N=50) with high frequency sensorineural hearing loss. (DB)

No differences were observed between six adults and six six-year-olds in measures of frequency selectivity and comodulation masking release. Children were less able to detect signals in noise backgrounds where the signal had perceptual qualities similar to the noise or in noise backgrounds having high degrees of fluctuation. (Author/JDD)

One experiment determined that the minimum angle at which infants can discriminate 2 sound presentations decreases substantially toward 48 weeks of age. In 3 succeeding experiments, infants aged 16, 20, and 28 weeks were able to discriminate sounds presented to each ear between 50 and 75 microseconds apart. (BC)