Development of Functional Spatial Hearing in Reverberation

Father Flanagan's Boys' Home

Status and phase: Completed; Early Phase 1

Conditions: Spatial Hearing Development

Treatments: Other: Low-Reverberation; Other: High-Reverberation

Study type: Interventional

Funder types: Other

Identifiers

NCT05815537

BoysTown

Details and patient eligibility

About

The goal of the clinical trial study (Phase 0) is to map out the developmental trajectory of functional spatial hearing abilities in reverberant environments for children with normal hearing between the ages of 6 and 18 years, and to understand the inter-relationships between the three perceptual abilities: auditory object size formation, spatial acuity, and spatial unmasking during typical development. Children are asked to perform psychoacoustic tasks when the auditory stimuli are processed to present in virtual acoustic environments (1) with no reverberation and (2) with one of the two levels of reverberation that emulate everyday indoor environments. The intervention of this clinical study is in the random assignment of one of the two reverberant environments. Researchers will compare these children with a group of normal-hearing adults to anchor matured performances.

Enrollment: 116 patients

Sex: All

Ages: 6 to 30 years old

Volunteers: Accepts Healthy Volunteers

Inclusion criteria

• All individuals within age limits who are typically developing with normal hearing who pass 25 dB HL from 250 Hz to 8000 Hz.

Exclusion criteria

• Individuals who fail hearing screen as described above.
• Individuals who have a diagnosed intellectual developmental disability

Trial design

Primary purpose: Basic Science

Allocation: Randomized

Interventional model: Parallel Assignment

Masking: None (Open label)

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116 participants in 2 patient groups

Low-Reverberation

Experimental group

Description:

Participants perform psychoacoustic tasks under a low-reverberant environment and a control environment without reverberation.

Treatment:

Other: Low-Reverberation

High-Reverberation

Experimental group

Description:

Participants perform psychoacoustic tasks under a high-reverberant environment and a control environment without reverberation.

Treatment:

Other: High-Reverberation