We studied the effect of speech time compression (TC), alone and in the presence of competing babble, in 24 adults and 24 children. Both adults and children showed significant decreases in speech recognition when speech was compressed at a rate of 60 percent, as compared with recognition of normal-rate speech. Listening to time-compressed speech in a binaural homophasic mode resulted in better ...

Hearing impaired individuals often have difficulty hearing in noise because of reduced spectral resolution. Previous research suggests that dichotic processing, where information from neighboring frequency regions is sent to opposite ears, may benefit those individuals. However, dichotic processing can degrade binaural cues, reducing spatial release from masking and localization accuracy. In th...

This investigation measured the degree to which hearing aids degrade speech discrimination in noise. Ten normal-hearing subjects were tested for speech reception thresholds (SRT) in noise. The tests were repeated under two aided conditions: one used binaural behind-the-ear (BTE) aids, the other an experimental binaural high-fidelity aid fitted with in-the-ear transducers. To assess the loss of ...

The auditory system derives the pitch of complex tones from the tone's harmonics. Research in psychoacoustics predicted that binaural fusion was an important feature of pitch processing. Based on neuromagnetic human data, the first neurophysiological confirmation of binaural fusion in hearing is presented. The centre of activation within the cortical tonotopic map corresponds to the location of...

Binaural performance is a general term that can be applied to a wide range of paradigms that involve listening with both ears. This review samples from across the spectrum of binaural tasks by highlighting recent studies that encapsulate certain aspects of binaural function. Studies of the precedence effect and binaural unmasking suggest that temporal coding in elderly listeners is degraded rel...

The purpose of this investigation was to study the impact of spectral shape and content on thresholds of discomfort (TD) for listeners with normal hearing and listeners with hearing loss. Secondary to that purpose was to quantify binaural summation at high intensities across complex stimulus conditions for both groups of listeners. Forty subjects (20 with normal hearing, 20 with hearing loss) p...

This paper presents an extension of the multi-channel Wiener filter (MWF) for noise reduction in binaural hearing aids, taking into account binaural localisation cues. By adding a term related to the interaural time difference (ITD) and the interaural level difference (ILD) of the noise component to the cost function of the MWF, the ITD and ILD cues of both the speech and the noise component ca...