A previous study from this laboratory indicated that the benefit obtained from a hearing aid in a noisy environment might increase over the first few months of hearing aid use. It was hypothesized that this acclimatization of benefit was due to a process in which the individual optimized his/her use of modified or newly available high-frequency acoustic speech cues. This investigation further e...

Providing effective hearing aid fittings for high-frequency hearing loss is a challenging and important clinical task. The importance of this task becomes even more apparent when considering the development of speech and language skills in the hearing-impaired pediatric population. Current research suggests that children require audibility of a broad bandwidth of speech for optimal access to hi...

Accent is cited as an issue for speech recognition systems [1]. Research has shown that accent mismatch between the training and the test data will result in significant accuracy reduction in Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems. Using HMM based ASR trained on a standard English accent, our study shows that the error rates can be up to seven times higher for accented speech, than for stan...

OBJECTIVE The objective of this study was to compare long-latency auditory evoked potentials before and after hearing aid fittings in children with sensorineural hearing loss compared with age-matched children with normal hearing. METHODS Thirty-two subjects of both genders aged 7 to 12 years participated in this study and were divided into two groups as follows: 14 children with normal heari...

A visual speech training aid for persons with hearing impairments has been developed using a Windows-based multimedia computer. The training aid provides real time visual feedback as to the quality of pronunciation for 10 steady-state American English monopthong vowels (/aa/, /iy/, /uw/, /ae/, /er/, /ih/, /eh/, /ao/, /ah/, and /uh/). This training aid is thus referred to as a Vowel Articulation...