Digital Commons Network^™

Influence Of Musicianship, Socioeconomic Status, And Working Memory On Children’S Speech Recognition In Noise, Victoria H. Whitney

Dissertations, 2020-current

Superior speech recognition in the presence of background noise has been repeatedly observed among musicians. For children whose auditory skills are immature or delayed, improved speech-in-noise understanding via musical training could have significant clinical implications. The present study considered the impact socioeconomic status (SES) and working memory have on musicians’ greater skill during such tasks in order to better understand the mediating factors of the proposed musician advantage, as well as provide additional evidence of its existence. Participants were recruited by the Laboratory for Auditory Perception in Children and Adults at James Madison University. Ultimately, twenty-five normal-hearing children between the …

The Test-Retest Reliability Of Binaural-Processing Tasks At Home Versus A Clinical Environment, Logan Grace Faust

Dissertations, 2014-2019

Objective: Investigate the reliability of a custom-designed, portable, stereo-hearing testing system (as in the Ganev, 2017, Au.D. dissertation) when subjects self-administer two different stereo-hearing tasks at home. Results obtained under known and supervised conditions at a university clinic or lab versus unknown conditions at the participants’ homes were compared. Intra-subject comparison, and inter-subject trends, discerned the reliability of patient setup and self-administration of the two tasks.
Design: Ten subjects were evenly split among two conditions: five subjects each setup and self-administered the tasks first at home and then received direction in the clinic, and five received direction and did the …

Development And Validation For A Mobile Speech-In-Noise Audiometric Task, Tommy Peng

McKelvey School of Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Traditional speech-in-noise hearing tests are performed by clinicians with specialized equipment. Furthermore, these tasks often present contextually weak sentences in background babble, which are poor representations of real-world situations. This study proposes a mobile audiometric task, Semantic Auditory Search, which uses the Android platform to bypass the need for specialized equipment and presents multiple tasks of two competing real-world conversations to estimate the user’s speech-in-noise hearing ability. Through linear regression models built from data of seventy-nine subjects, three Semantic Auditory Search metrics have been shown to have statistically significant (p < 0.05) with medium effects sizes for predicting QuickSIN SNR50. The internal consistency of the task was also high, with a Cronbach’s alpha of 0.88 or more across multiple metrics. In conclusion, this preliminary study suggests that Semantic Auditory Search can accurately and reliably perform as an automated speech-in-noise hearing test. It also has tremendous potential for extension into automated tests of cognitive function, as well.

Attitudes Of Normal Hearing Listeners Towards Personal Sound Amplification Products: Etymotic Bean, Jennifer Rhoades

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Despite the remarkable prevalence of hearing loss in the United States, only a small percentage of these individuals utilize hearing aids. Many factors have been associated with the non-adoption of hearing aids, including financial reasons and the stigma associated with hearing aid use. Personal sound amplification products (PSAP) have been recently introduced as a more discrete and less costly type of assistive listening technology. While the Food and Drug Administration does not approve these devices for individuals with hearing loss, they are advertised as being useful for boosting soft sounds and amplifying speech in the presence of background noise.

The …

Binaural Listening In Young And Middle-Aged Adults: Interaural Phase Differences And Speech-In-Noise Measures, Caitlin Cotter

Dissertations, 2014-2019

Difficulty understanding speech in the presence of noise is a common complaint of middle-aged and older adults with and without hearing loss. There is an incomplete picture of what contributes to difficulties understanding speech-in-noise in adults who have normal audiograms. As humans we listen binaurally, so declines in binaural processing may contribute to speech-in-noise difficulties. We examined the effects of age on the upper frequency limit of interaural phase difference (IPD) detection and IPD detection at fixed frequencies. We also examined a speech-in-noise measure of spatial separation across young and middle-aged, normal-hearing individuals.

Participants were young (n=12) and middle-aged (n=8) …

The Neural Representation And Behavioral Detection Of Frequency Modulation, Daniel Elliott Shearer

Dissertations, 2014-2019

Understanding a speech signal is reliant on the ability of the auditory system to accurately encode rapidly changing spectral and temporal cues over time. Evidence from behavioral studies in humans suggests that relatively poor temporal fine structure (TFS) encoding ability is correlated with poorer performance on speech understanding tasks in quiet and in noise. Electroencephalography, including measurement of the frequency-following response, has been used to assess the human central auditory nervous system’s ability to encode temporal patterns in steady-state and dynamic tonal stimuli and short syllables. To date, the FFR has been used to investigate the accuracy of phase-locked auditory …