Purpose: International evidence suggests youth offenders have greater difficulties with oral language than their nonoffending peers. This study examined the hearing, auditory processing, and language skills of male youth offenders and remandees (YORs) in New Zealand. Method: Thirty-three male YORs, aged 14-17 years, were recruited from 2 youth…

Purpose: Five experiments probed auditory-visual (AV) understanding of sentences by users of cochlear implants (CIs). Method: Sentence material was presented in auditory (A), visual (V), and AV test conditions to listeners with normal hearing and CI users. Results: (a) Most CI users report that most of the time, they have access to both A and V…

The auditory system helps regulate phonation. A speaker's perception of their own voice is likely to be of both emotional and functional significance. Although many investigations have observed deviating voice qualities in individuals who are prelingually deaf or profoundly hearing impaired, less is known regarding how older adults with acquired…

Purpose: Wideband acoustic immittance (WAI) is a new technique for assessing middle ear transfer function. It includes energy absorbance (EA) measures and can be acquired with the ear canal pressure varied, known as "wideband tympanometry" (WBTymp). The authors of this study aimed to investigate effects of consecutive WBTymp testing on…

Daniel Ling created the "Ling Sound Test" (auditory assessment tool) and it was first published in the book titled "Speech and the Hearing-Impaired Child: Theory and Practice" (Ling,1976). The philosophy behind Ling's sound test is to use a range of speech sounds that largely represents the speech spectrum from 250-8000 Hz…

Purpose: The objectives of this study were to determine (a) whether school-age children with typical hearing demonstrate poorer auditory working memory performance in multitalker babble at degraded signal-to-noise ratios than in quiet; and (b) whether the amount of cognitive demand of the task contributed to differences in performance in noise. It…

Atypical auditory perception is a widely recognised but poorly understood feature of autism. In the current study, we used magnetoencephalography to measure the brain responses of 10 autistic children as they listened passively to dichotic pitch stimuli, in which an illusory tone is generated by sub-millisecond inter-aural timing differences in…

This paper outlines a method of auditory and acoustic analysis for determining the tonemes of a language starting from scratch, drawing on the author's experience of recording and analyzing tone languages of north-east India. The methodology is applied to a preliminary analysis of tone in the Thang dialect of Khiamniungan, a virtually undocumented…

Purpose: In this study, the authors examined how signal clarity interacts with the use of sentence context information in determining speech-in-noise recognition for children with cochlear implants and children with normal hearing. Method: One hundred and twenty sentences in which the final word varied in predictability (high vs. low semantic…

Method: Complete psychometric functions for phoneme and word recognition scores at 8 signal-to-noise ratios from -15 dB to 20 dB were generated for the first 10, 20, and 25, as well as all 50, three-word presentations of the Tri-Word or Computer Assisted Speech Recognition Assessment (CASRA) Test (Gelfand, 1998) based on the results of 12…

Teaching the acoustic properties of materials is a good way to teach physics concepts, extending them into the technological arena related to materials science. This article describes an innovative approach for teaching sound and acoustics in combination with sound insulating materials in secondary school (15-16-year-old students). Concerning the…

Recent work demonstrates that learning to understand noise-vocoded (NV) speech alters sublexical perceptual processes but is enhanced by the simultaneous provision of higher-level, phonological, but not lexical content (Hervais-Adelman, Davis, Johnsrude, & Carlyon, 2008), consistent with top-down learning (Davis, Johnsrude, Hervais-Adelman,…

Purpose: The goal was to assess the effects of maturation and phonological development on performance, by normally hearing children, on an imitative test of auditory capacity (On-Line Imitative Test of Speech-Pattern Contrast Perception [OlimSpac]; Boothroyd, Eisenberg, & Martinez, 2006; Eisenberg, Martinez, & Boothroyd, 2003, 2007). Method:…

Purpose: Studies using speech stimuli to elicit electrophysiologic responses have found approximately 30% of children with language-based learning problems demonstrate abnormal brainstem timing. Research is needed regarding how these responses relate to performance on behavioral tests of central auditory function. The purpose of the study was to…

The type, degree, and configuration of hearing loss, if one is present, can be determined by reading an audiogram. The type of hearing loss is determined by comparing auditory thresholds obtained using head-phones or insert earphones (air-conduction thresholds) to those obtained using a bone oscillator (bone-conduction thresholds). By itself, the…