Human listeners can perceive speech signals in a voicemodulated ultrasonic carrier from a bone-conduction stimulator, even if the listeners are patients with sensorineural hearing loss. Considering this fact, we have been developing a boneconducted ultrasonic hearing aid (BCUHA). The purpose of this study is to evaluate the usability of BCUHA regarding transmission of speaker discrimination inf...

Whispered speech lacks the vocal chord vibration which is typically used to distinguish voiced and unvoiced consonants, making their discrimination a challenging task. In this work, we objectively and subjectively quantify the amount of discrimination between a voiced (V) consonant and its unvoiced (UV) counterpart using seven V-UV consonant pairs in six Indian languages, in neutral and whisper...

The effect of Pavlovian discrimination training with two stimuli upon subsequent learning of an operant discrimination involving those stimuli was studied. After preliminary lever press training, the lever was removed and thirsty rats received noncontingent pairings between S(1) (a tone or a clicker) and water reinforcements, whereas S(2) (a clicker or a tone) occurred always without reinforcem...

Birds have excellent spatial acuity and colour vision compared to other vertebrates while spatial contrast sensitivity is relatively poor for unknown reasons. Contrast sensitivity describes the detection of gratings of varying spatial frequency. It is unclear whether bird brightness discrimination between large uniform fields is poor as well. Here we show that budgerigars (Melopsittacus undulat...

Underwater, the contrast between object and background is much larger reduced with increasing distance between object and observer than in air. For marine predators, such as pinnipeds, it would therefore be advantageous to possess a high sensitivity for brightness differences, since this would increase the distance at which prey can be detected visually. Few studies have examined the brightness...

BACKGROUND hearing discrimination abilities in children with phonological disorders. AIM to investigate the ability of hearing discrimination in children with Phonological Disorders who received or were receiving phonological treatment; to verify if the altered phonemes were the same as those which were not discriminated in the Picture Test for Hearing Discrimination (adapted for Portuguese l...

Background: hearing discrimination abilities in children with phonological disorders. Aim: to investigate the ability of hearing discrimination in children with Phonological Disorders who received or were receiving phonological treatment; to verify if the altered phonemes were the same as those which were not discriminated in the Picture Test for Hearing Discrimination (adapted for Portuguese l...

OBJECTIVE The Heidelberg Phoneme Discrimination Test (HLAD), developed and standardized in 1998, is widely used in the differential diagnosis of dyslexia. Normative data have only been available for children of the 2nd and 4th grades, while norms for the 3rd grade are still missing. PATIENTS AND METHODS We assessed three HLAD subtests [auditory phoneme discrimination, kinesthetic phoneme disc...

This study compares the efficiency and plausibility of published computational models of familiarity discrimination in the perirhinal cortex. Substantial evidence indicates that the perirhinal cortex is involved in both the familiarity discrimination aspect of recognition memory and in perceptual functions involved with representations of complete stimuli (i.e., object identification). Publishe...

Background: Hearing loss is one of the common complaints of diabetics. The aim of this study was to evaluate the hearing status of diabetic patients in Babol, North of Iran. Methods: The hearing status of 50 type 2 diabetic patients (case group) and 50 healthy individuals (control group) were evaluated from October 2011 to September 2012. Audiometry was done with the frequencies of 250, 500, 1...