Communication Sciences and Disorders Commons^™

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 …

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 …