Hearing impairment is one of the most frequent sensory deficits in humans, affecting more than 250 million people in the world. Consequences of hearing loss include inability to interpret speech, often resulting in a reduced ability to communicate and delay in language acquisition. Untreated hearing loss may also cause economic and educational disadvantage, social isolation and cause stigmatiza...

This research investigated the concurrent association between early reading skills and phonological awareness (PA), print knowledge, language, cognitive, and demographic variables in 101 5-year-old children with prelingual hearing losses ranging from mild to profound who communicated primarily using spoken language. All participants were fitted with hearing aids (n = 71) or cochlear implants (n...

Hearing aids are used to improve sound audibility for people with hearing loss, but the ability to make use of the amplified signal, especially in the presence of competing noise, can vary across people. Here we review how neuroscientists, clinicians, and engineers are using various types of physiological information to improve the design and use of hearing aids.

the low-frequency speech information is because low frequency information may also be carried by high frequency fibers through temporal coding. Thornton & Abbas compared the speech recognition ability of 3 subjects who were identified with a low frequency dead region and 5 normal-hearing individuals in various filtered conditions. In the unfiltered condition, the speech scores were 56% to 88% f...

Introduction: Speech intelligibility, the ability to be understood verbally by listeners, is the gold standard for assessing the effectiveness of cochlear implantation. Thus, the goal of this study was to compare the speech intelligibility between normal-hearing and cochlear-implanted children using the Persian intelligibility test.   Materials and Methods: Twenty-six cochlear-implanted childre...

Epigenetic regulation of gene expression has been shown to change over time and may be associated with environmental exposures in common complex traits. Age-related hearing impairment is a complex disorder, known to be heritable, with heritability estimates of 57-70%. Epigenetic regulation might explain the observed difference in age of onset and magnitude of hearing impairment with age. Epigen...

OBJECTIVE The main objective was to investigate the effect of linguistic abilities (lexical-access ability and vocabulary size) on different measures of speech-in-noise recognition in normal-hearing listeners with various levels of language proficiency. DESIGN Speech reception thresholds (SRTs) were measured for sentences in steady-state (SRTstat) and fluctuating noise (SRTfluc), and for digi...

BACKGROUND Hearing threshold data are not particularly predictive of self-perceived hearing handicap or readiness to pursue amplification. Poor correlations between these measures have been reported repeatedly. When a patient is evaluated for hearing loss, it is common to collect both threshold data and the individual's self-perception of hearing ability. This is done to help the patient make a...

Identification of place of articulation in the synthesized syllables /bi/, /di/, and /gi/ was examined in three groups of listeners: (a) normal hearers, (b) subjects with high-frequency sensorineural hearing loss, and (c) normally hearing subjects listening in noise. Stimuli with an appropriate second formant (F2) transition (moving-F2 stimuli) were compared with stimuli in which F2 was constan...