Purpose: The purpose of the current study was to assess the effect of fast and slow attack/release times (ATs/RTs) on aided perception of reverberant speech in quiet. Method: Thirty listeners with mild-to-moderate sensorineural hearing loss were tested monaurally with a commercial hearing aid programmed in 3 AT/RT settings: linear, fast (AT = 9…

A key objective when fitting hearing aids to children is to maximize the audibility of high frequency speech cues which are critical in the understanding of spoken English. Recent advances in digital signal processing have enabled the development of hearing aids which offer linear frequency transposition as a new way of accessing these important…

Purpose: To determine why, in a pilot study, only 1 of 11 cochlear implant listeners was able to reliably identify a frequency-to-electrode map where the intervals of a familiar melody were played on the correct musical scale. The authors sought to validate their method and to assess the effect of pitch strength on musical scale recognition in…

Purpose: To compare the effectiveness of 3 self-administered strategies for auditory training that might improve speech perception by adult users of cochlear implants. The strategies are based, respectively, on discriminating isolated words, words in sentences, and phonemes in nonsense syllables. Method: Participants were 18 normal-hearing adults…

Purpose: To compare speech intelligibility in the presence of a 10-Hz square-wave noise masker in younger and older listeners and to relate performance to recovery from forward masking. Method: The signal-to-noise ratio required to achieve 50% sentence identification in the presence of a 10-Hz square-wave noise masker was obtained for each of the…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine children's head orientation relative to the arrival angle of competing signals and the sound source of interest in actual school settings. These data were gathered to provide information relative to the potential for directional benefit. Method: Forty children, 4-17 years of age, with and without…

Purpose: The change/no-change procedure (J. E. Sussman & A. E. Carney, 1989), which assesses speech discrimination, has been used under the assumption that the number of stimulus presentations does not influence performance. Motivated by the tenets of the multiple looks hypothesis (N. F. Viemeister & G. H. Wakefield, 1991), work by R. F. Holt and…

Purpose: The effects of multichannel expansion on the objective and subjective evaluation of 20 listeners fitted binaurally with 4-channel, digital in-the-ear hearing instruments were investigated. Method: Objective evaluations were conducted in quiet using the Connected Speech Test (CST) and in noise using the Hearing in Noise Test (HINT) at 40,…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine in listeners with normal hearing and listeners with sensorineural hearing loss the within- and between-group differences obtained with 4 commonly available speech-in-noise protocols. Method: Recognition performances by 24 listeners with normal hearing and 72 listeners with sensorineural hearing…

Purpose: To determine the rankings of 6 input-output functions for understanding low-level, conversational, and high-level speech in multitalker babble without manipulating volume control for listeners with normal hearing, flat sensorineural hearing loss, and mildly sloping sensorineural hearing loss. Method: Peak clipping, compression limiting,…

Purpose: It has long been known that children with specific language impairment (SLI) can demonstrate difficulty with auditory speech perception. However, speech perception can also involve the integration of both auditory and visual articulatory information. Method: Fifty-six preschool children, half with and half without SLI, were studied in…

Purpose: To examine reductions in performance on auditory tasks by aphasic and neurologically intact individuals as a result of concomitant magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner noise. Method: Four tasks together forming a continuum of linguistic complexity were developed. They included complex-tone pitch discrimination, same-different…

Infants were tested for their discrimination of changes in the melodic contour (direction of successive pitch changes) of brief melodies in the context of discernible variations in key or interval size. (PCB)