PURPOSE This review outlines the anatomical and functional bases of somatosensory influences on auditory processing in the normal brainstem and midbrain. It then explores how interactions between the auditory and somatosensory system are modified through deafness, and their impact on tinnitus is discussed. METHOD Literature review, tract tracing, immunohistochemistry, and in vivo electrophysi...

Many studies have explored how neuromodulators affect synaptic function, yet little is known about how they modify computations at the microcircuit level. In the dorsal cochlear nucleus (DCN), a region that integrates auditory and multisensory inputs from two distinct pathways, serotonin (5-HT) enhances excitability of principal cells, predicting a generalized reduction in sensory thresholds. S...

Young children often have a preference for auditory input, with auditory input often overshadowing visual input. The current research investigated the developmental trajectory and factors underlying these effects with 137 infants, 132 four-year-olds, and 89 adults. Auditory preference reverses with age: Infants demonstrated an auditory preference, 4-year-olds switched between auditory and visua...

This paper demonstrates the application of the Bionic Wavelet Transform (BWT), an adaptive wavelet transform derived from a nonlinear auditory model of the cochlea, to the task of speech signal enhancement. Results, measured objectively by Signal-to-Noise ratio (SNR) and Segmental SNR (SSNR) and subjectively by Mean Opinion Score (MOS), are given for additive white Gaussian noise as well as fou...

There are three times as many outer hair cells (OHC) as inner hair cells (IHC), yet IHC transmit virtually all acoustic information to the brain as they synapse with 90-95% of type I auditory nerve fibers. Here we review a comprehensive series of experiments aimed at determining how loss of the IHC/type I system affects hearing by selectively destroying these cells in chinchillas using the otot...

Eleven women and eleven men who stutter had to read five text passages, each with non altered, delayed (53 msec) and frequency shifted (-1⁄2 octave) auditory feedback, provided by headphones. Stuttering was measured as Percentage of Discontinuous Speech Time, by which durations of all stuttering moments are determined and related to the entire duration of the speech sample. For both sexes stutt...

People who stutter (PWS) can reduce their stuttering rates under masking noise and altered auditory feedback; such a response can be attributed to altered auditory input, which suggests that abnormal speech processing in PWS results from abnormal processing of auditory input. However, the details of this abnormal processing of basic auditory information remain unclear. In order to characterize ...

In multisensory integration, processing in one sensory modality is enhanced by complementary information from other modalities. Intersensory timing is crucial in this process because only inputs reaching the brain within a restricted temporal window are perceptually bound. Previous research in the audiovisual field has investigated various features of the temporal binding window, revealing asym...