Prevalence of potential hybrid and conventional cochlear implant candidates based on audiometric profile

Letter to the editor

Auditory temporal capabilities and sentence intelligibility in the elderly

The purpose of this investigation was to study age-related changes in certain auditory temporal processing abilities of listeners. The relationship between temporal processing and auditory object formation in speech perception also was investigated. Two experiments were conducted to investigate these issues. Evaluation of temporal capabilities in a speech perception task was measured by studying the effect of amplitude modulation on sentence intelligibility. Time-varying sinusoidal (TVS) replicas of natural speech served as baseline stimuli for Experiments 1 and 2. The TVS sentences remained either unmodulated or were amplitude modulated at 100 Hz in Experiment 1, or were modulated at 10 and 100 Hz in Experiment 2. Improvement in intelligibility due to amplitude modulation is called Modulation Intelligibility Improvement (MII). In Experiment 1, MII was compared with gap detection abilities in two groups of participants: elderly listeners wearing hearing aids and young adults with normal hearing. In Experiment 2, MII was compared with comodulation masking release (CMR) in three groups of participants: elderly with normal hearing, elderly listeners with hearing impairment not wearing hearing aids, and young adults with normal hearing. Experiment 1 showed no difference on the gap detection abilities between the elderly and young listeners. Sentence intelligibility results indicated amplitude modulation interfered with elderly listeners\u27 ability to understand TVS sentences while it improved intelligibility for younger listeners. In Experiment 2, CMR was demonstrated at the 10 Hz modulation rate. Amplitude modulation improved sentence intelligibility with the largest MII effect at 100 Hz. CMR and MII were only correlated in young listeners at modulation rates of 10 Hz. All listeners, except for those wearing hearing aids during the study, were able to use amplitude modulation to improve sentence intelligibility

Advantages of Binaural Hearing

The human auditory system possesses an amazing ability to hear sounds with two ears and to combine the two signals into one to be processed by the brain. This is called binaural processing. This chapter discusses the cues that our auditory system uses to recognize sounds and to separate them into different sound sources, and how listeners with hearing aids and cochlear implants use these cues to enable binaural hearing. It should be noted that most of this discussion on how the auditory system processes sounds is based on findings generally tested in a controlled laboratory environment. Therefore, we try to generalize our discussion to how the auditory system may work in a noncontrolled environment (i.e., a local restaurant)

Psychological Treatments for Tinnitus

It may be decades before a magic pill is found to eliminate tinnitus, and, for the present, the most helpful treatment is appropriate psychological counseling. Millions of people have tinnitus and are not bothered by it, so it logical to focus on moving tinnitus sufferers from the "bothered by" to the "not bothered by" group. In this chapter, we provide a general account of common psychological approaches to help patients with tinnitus

Bilateral and Unilateral Cochlear Implant Users Compared on Speech Perception in Noise

Objective: Compare speech performance in noise with matched bilateral cochlear implant (ClCl) and unilateral cochlear implant (Cl only) users. Design: Thirty CICI and 30 CI-only subjects were tested on a battery of speech perception tests in noise that use an eight-loudspeaker array. Results: On average, ClCl subject's performance with speech in noise was significantly better than the Cl-only subjects. Conclusion: The CICI group showed significantly better performance on speech perception in noise compared with the CI-only subjects, supporting the hypothesis that CICI is more beneficial than CI only