Purpose: This study investigated methods used to simulate factors associated with reduced audibility, increased speech levels, and spectral shaping for aided older adults with hearing loss. Simulations provided to younger normal-hearing adults were used to investigate the effect of sensation level, speech presentation level, and spectral shape in…

Purpose: General language abilities of children with cochlear implants have been thoroughly investigated, especially at young ages, but far less is known about how well they process language in real-world settings, especially in higher grades. This study addressed this gap in knowledge by examining recognition of sentences with complex syntactic…

Purpose: Speech recognition in complex listening environments is enhanced by the extent of spatial separation between the speech source and background competing sources, an effect known as spatial release from masking (SRM). The aim of this study was to investigate whether the phase-locked neural activity in the central auditory pathways,…

Purpose: The purpose of the current study was to examine inhibition of irrelevant information in younger and older English monolingual and Spanish--English bilingual adults. Method: Sixty-one participants divided into four groups: 15 younger English monolinguals, 16 younger Spanish-English bilinguals, 15 older English monolinguals, and 15 older…

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…

Deficits in temporal resolution and/or the precedence effect may underlie part of the speech understanding difficulties experienced by older listeners in degraded acoustic environments. In a previous investigation, R. Roberts and J. Lister (2004) identified a positive correlation between measures of temporal resolution and the precedence effect,…