The Effect of Cochlear Dysfunction on Central Auditory Speech Test Performance

The major purpose of this study was to explore the effect of cochlear dysfunction on central auditory speech test performance. There has been limited research reported concerning the effects of peripheral hearing loss occurring in the absence of central auditory pathology on tests specifically designed to diagnose central auditory impairment. Similarly, there has been limited research reported concerning the effects of peripheral hearing loss in the presence of central auditory pathology on tests designed specifically for the evaluation and diagnosis of central auditory pathology. Despite the lack of such data, these tests are frequently performed on individuals with cochlear pathology, suspected of having co-existent central pathology. Both definition of candidacy for central auditory testing in the presence of cochlear pathology and the interpretation of such test results appear arbitrary in that they are left to the discretion of the individual examiner. This study was a systematic investigation of the use of a battery of central auditory speech tests with cochlear impaired subjects. Thirty-three subjects, 15 males and 18 females, ranging in age from 18-58 years, all with sensorineural hearing loss medically diagnosed to have cochlear site of lesion, were evaluated using a central auditory speech test battery consisting of the following tests: the Competing Sentence Test, the Synthetic Sentence Identification Test-Contralateral Competing Message, the Synthetic Sentence Identification Test-Ipsilateral Competing Message, the Staggered Spondaic Word Test, the Binaural Fusion Test, the Rapid Alternating Speech Test, and the Monaural Low-Pass Filtered Speech Test. The findings suggest that cochlear dysfunction has an effect on central auditory speech test performance. The degree of the effect varies with (a) the choice of the test, (b) the presentation level of the test, (c) the undistorted speech discrimination scores of the cochlear impaired subject, (d) the audiogram configuration, and (e) the presentation mode of the test. The level of performance on the central auditory speech test battery is related to the level of the auditory site for which the tests are intended. The level of performance was highest for those tests designed primarily for the evaluation of cortical functioning; that is the Synthetic Sentence Identification Test-Contralateral Competing Message, the Competing Sentence Test, and the Staggered Spondaic Word Test. The lower the level of the auditory lesion for which the tests are intended, the poorer the level of performance; these tests include the Binaural Fusion Test, the Rapid Alternating Speech Test, the Synthetic Sentence Identification Test-Ipsilateral Competing Message, and the Monaural Low-Pass Filtered Speech Test. Based on those investigated in this study, the following central auditory speech test battery is recommended: (a) Competing Sentence Test at 35dBSL, (b) the Synthetic Sentence Identification Test-Contralateral Competing Message at MCR -40dBHL at 30dBSL, (c) the Staggered Spondaic Word Test at 50dBSL using Katz\u27 scoring procedure, and (d) the Binaural Fusion Test at 40dBSL. Suggestions are made for administering the Rapid Alternating Speech Test and the Synthetic Sentence Identification Test-Ipsilateral Competing Message using specific modifications. The use of the Monaural Low-Pass Filtered Speech Test is not recommended for cochlear impaired individuals. Recommendations for candidacy for central auditory speech testing in cochlear impaired subjects are made. A table of difference scores is proposed to compare the performance of cochlear impaired subjects with normal hearing subjects and cochlear impaired subjects with central auditory impaired individuals to aid in the interpretation of central auditory speech test scores

Protecting public trust resources in America\u27s private forests: case studies in the diversity of U.S. state-level forestry policies

Privately-owned forests in the U.S. provide ecological and socioeconomic benefits to Americans. At the same time, they challenge common law principles that govern the administration of public goods. There is long-standing tension between private property rights, which entitles forest landowners to make land management decisions about their properties, and the role of state governments in protecting public trust resources on behalf of the general public. Each state chooses to protect public trust resources on private lands in a different way, meaning the U.S. is a patchwork of diverse private forest policy approaches. Describing this range of approaches can help inform policy discussions. Researchers typically administer quantitative surveys to identify policy diversity, but few have utilized qualitative methods to characterize policy approaches to forest management on private lands. This two-part study addresses this gap in literature by sampling the diversity of state-level forest policies present in the U.S. In Chapter 1, I use qualitative interviews with forestry policy experts to provide an in-depth look at different state forest policies across 12 case studies. In Chapter 2, I further explore the California case study to understand its highly regulatory forest policies from a landowner perspective. I interviewed a group of California family forest landowners to understand how they perceive the state’s balance between private property rights and public trust doctrine and how they navigate their regulatory policy environment to successfully achieve their forest management objectives. Examining this cross-section of U.S. forest policy diversity builds additional nuance into traditional frameworks (e.g., voluntary-to-regulatory framings), which allows for key comparisons between states and adds in-depth forest policy expert and landowner perspectives to the body of state-level forest policy literature

Formation of the Wink Sink, A Salt Dissolution and Collapse Feature, Winkler County, Texas

UT Librarie

Examining the role of professional orientation in how trustees of New Jersey\u27s state colleges and universities experience their fiduciary responsibilities: A mixed methods study

The purpose of this sequential explanatory study was to examine, through the lenses of sensemaking theory and professional authority, the relationship between how largely non-educational professionals in New Jersey experience their fiduciary responsibilities as trustees of the state\u27s public colleges and universities and to what extent their professional orientations influence their oversight. Trustees draw from a continuum of orientations to navigate their responsibilities and chief among them are professional orientation, institutionally-rooted orientation, and orientations as members of traditionally underrepresented populations. Trustees frequently engage in deferential activities with their fellow board members whose professional or other orientations provide needed context for their decision making. Trustees also rely on informal engagement with their institutions as a vehicle through which they make sense of their responsibilities. This engagement, as well as opportunities to apply their professional orientations to their duties as fiduciaries, contribute to trustee satisfaction but are limited in frequency. Implications for policy, practice, leadership, and research are discussed

Strategies to increase parent participation in IEP conferences

This is the publisher's version, also found here: http://sped.org

Childhood health-care practices among Italians and Jews in the United States, 1910-1940

This paper examines attitudes toward childhood health-care practices among urban Italian and Jewish families in the United States in the first part of the twentieth century. Although women in both groups were concerned about their children’s health, Italian and Jewish respondents differed in their attitudes toward home remedies, doctors, and medical advice literature. Jewish women were more likely to turn rapidly to professional medical assistance, typically from Jewish doctors, whereas Italian women were more likely to rely longer on common sense before eventually seeking professional medical intervention outside the family and ethnic group. These differences are evident both in the respondents’ recollections of their mothers’ and their own child-care practices, and suggest persistent ethnic cultures. That differences in child care are consistent with the mortality differences documented in other sources supports previous speculations about the importance of child care, and thus the role of culture in health transitions

The public image of the social worker.

Thesis (M.S.)--Boston Universit

Haunting Experiences: Ghosts in Contemporary Folklore

Ghosts and the supernatural appear throughout modern culture, in any number of entertainment, commercial, and other contexts. Popular media\u27s commodified representations of ghosts can be quite different from what people believe about them, based on tradition or direct experience. Belief and tradition and the popular or commercial nevertheless continually feed off each other. They frequently share space in how people think about the supernatural. In Haunting Experiences, three well-known folklorists broaden the discussion of ghost lore by examining it from multiple angles in various modern contexts. Diane E. Goldstein, Sylvia Ann Grider, and Jeannie Banks Thomas take ghosts seriously. They draw on contemporary scholarship that emphasizes the basis of belief in experience and the usefulness of ghost stories. And they look closely at the narrative role of such lore in matters such as socialization and gender. Together, they unravel the complex mix of mass media, commodification, and popular culture that today puts old spirits into new contexts.https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/usupress_pubs/1017/thumbnail.jp