Spectral Dynamics and Speech Understanding by Hearing Impaired People

VA Office of Research and Development

Status: Completed

Conditions: Hearing Loss, Sensorineural

Treatments: Other: Acoustic distortion of speech

Study type: Interventional

Funder types: Other U.S. Federal agency

Identifiers

NCT01867515

5I01RX001020-03 (U.S. NIH Grant/Contract)

C1020-R

Details and patient eligibility

About

The purpose of this program of research is to understand the perception of the dynamic spectral properties of speech by hearing-impaired listeners, with the long-term goal of improving speech understanding by these individuals in adverse listening conditions. The proposed research compares the performance of normally-hearing and hearing-impaired listeners on measures of speech understanding in the presence of different types of signal distortion and speech understanding of signals with enhanced spectral dynamics. A computational model based on the amount of potential information available in speech will be used to quantify differences in speech intelligibility due to hearing status and stimulus characteristics.

Full description

This is a behavioral study of human auditory perception. Each experiment in this study involves prospective data collection from three types of listeners. The experimental listeners will be people with sensorineural hearing loss and the control listeners will either be subjects with normal hearing or normal-hearing listeners for whom hearing loss will be simulated through the use of a spectrally-shaped broadband noise. The tasks of the subjects in this study involve either listening to synthesized sounds over earphones while seated comfortably in a sound-treated booth, and making responses indicating the subject's auditory perception of these sounds by touching specific areas on a touch-screen terminal; or, listening to recorded, acoustically modified syllables, words, or sentences over earphones and making responses indicating the subject's identification.

Enrollment: 50 patients

Sex: All

Ages: 18 to 65 years old

Volunteers: Accepts Healthy Volunteers

Inclusion criteria

• individuals with hearing thresholds of 20 dB HL or better at all octave frequencies between 250 Hz and 4000 Hz
• or, individuals with bilateral sensorineural hearing losses with thresholds between 25 and 70 dB HL and no losses greater than 70 dB HL at frequencies of 4000 Hz or below

Exclusion criteria

• a conductive hearing impairment or other otological pathology
• hearing thresholds greater than 70 dB HL at any frequencies of 4000 Hz or below or pure-tone averages (averaged across 500, 1000, and 2000 Hz) of greater than 65 dB HL
• bilateral differences greater than 20 dB at any frequency below 4000 Hz
• an inability to complete the experimental tasks

Trial design

Primary purpose: Other

Allocation: Non-Randomized

Interventional model: Single Group Assignment

Masking: None (Open label)

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50 participants in 3 patient groups

Younger normally-hearing listeners

Active Comparator group

Description:

Participants with auditory thresholds within the normal limits. * age between 18 and 35 * individuals with hearing thresholds of 20 dB HL or better at all octave frequencies between 250 Hz and 4000 Hz Acoustic distortion of speech

Treatment:

Other: Acoustic distortion of speech

Hearing-impaired listeners

Active Comparator group

Description:

individuals with bilateral sensorineural hearing losses with thresholds between 25 and 70 dB HL and no losses greater than 70 dB HL at frequencies of 4000 Hz or below * age 18 to 65 Acoustic distortion of speech

Treatment:

Other: Acoustic distortion of speech

Older normally-hearing listeners

Active Comparator group

Description:

Participants with auditory thresholds within the normal limits. * age between 36 and 65 * individuals with hearing thresholds of 20 dB HL or better at all octave frequencies between 250 Hz and 4000 Hz Acoustic distortion of speech

Treatment:

Other: Acoustic distortion of speech