Deaf native signers have a general working memory (WM) capacity similar to that of hearing non-signers but are less sensitive to the temporal order of stored items at retrieval. General WM capacity declines with age, but little is known of how cognitive aging affects WM function in deaf signers. We investigated WM function in elderly deaf signers (EDS) and an age-matched comparison group of hea...

Objective The present, case-control, study investigates binaural hearing performance in schizophrenia patients towards sentences presented in quiet and noise. Methods Participants were twenty-one healthy controls and sixteen schizophrenia patients with normal peripheral auditory functions. The binaural hearing was examined in four listening conditions by using the Malay version of hearing in ...

Confronted with the loss of one type of sensory input, we compensate using information conveyed by other senses. However, losing one type of sensory information at specific developmental times may lead to deficits across all sensory modalities. We addressed the effect of auditory deprivation on the development of tactile abilities, taking into account changes occurring at the behavioral and cor...

Intuitively, we all believe that binaural processing plays a critical role in communication, especially at the venerable “cocktail party.” Indeed, if you attend a poster session at a large conference (like the ICA), close your eyes, plug one ear, and try to follow a scientific discussion, you will experience the importance of having two ears. Here we will discuss how binaural processing contrib...

This study investigated to what extent spatial release from masking (SRM) deficits in hearing-impaired adults may be related to reduced audibility of the test stimuli. Sixteen adults with sensorineural hearing loss and 28 adults with normal hearing were assessed on the Listening in Spatialized Noise-Sentences test, which measures SRM using a symmetric speech-on-speech masking task. Stimuli for ...

Noise reduction algorithms in hearing aids are crucial to improve speech understanding in background noise for hearing impaired persons. For binaural hearing aids, algorithms that exploit the microphone signals from both the left and the right hearing aid are considered to be promising techniques for noise reduction, because in addition to spectral information spatial information can be exploit...

BACKGROUND The ability to use interaural cues to segregate target speech from competing signals allows people with normal hearing to understand speech at significantly poorer signal-to-noise ratios. This ability, referred to as spatial processing ability or spatial release from masking, has been shown to be deficient in people with a sensorineural hearing loss even after amplification is applie...

We will demo the features of Sound Lab (SLAB), a softwarebased real-time virtual acoustic environment (VAE) rendering system designed for use in the personal computer environment. SLAB is being developed as a tool for the study of spatial hearing.

Microphone arrays are known to enhance the directionality and signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) over single-channel sensors. This is considered beneficial in many applications such as video-conferencing systems and hearing aids. However, this advantage comes at the price of the sensation of spatial hearing. The spatial cues due to diffractions of the head and torso are lost if the array is not fitted...

We assessed how visually impaired (VI) people perceived their own auditory abilities using an established hearing questionnaire, the Speech, Spatial, and Qualities of Hearing Scale (SSQ), that was adapted to make it relevant and applicable to VI individuals by removing references to visual aspects while retaining the meaning of the original questions. The resulting questionnaire, the SSQvi, ass...