HEARING AID USE AND SPEECH PERCEPTION Associations between tinnitus characteristics and sleep difficulties were also analyzed separately with four ancillary groups, including the potential candidates for cochlear implantation (Candidate group), to estimate the potential independent and combined contributions of hearing aid (HA) use and poor speech perception. Post-hoc contrasts were also analyz...

Gestures and visible speech cues are often available to listeners to aid their comprehension of the speaker’s meaning. However, visual communication cues are not always beneficial over-and-above the audible speech cues. My goal is to outline several types of constraints which operate in the human cognitive processing system that bear on this question: When do visual language cues (visible speec...

This paper outlines the motivation and development of a pronunciation aid (MPAi) for the Māori language, the language of the indigenous people of New Zealand. Māori is threatened and after a break in transmission the language is currently undergoing revitalization. The data for the aid has come from a corpus of 60 speakers (men and women). The language aid allows users to model their speech aga...

Currently published hearing aid fitting protocols recommend speech-in-noise testing and loudness measures, but it remains unclear how these measures affect hearing aid benefit and user satisfaction. This study compared two protocols in their effects on benefit and satisfaction. Protocol A included an electroacoustic analysis, real-ear measures, and hearing aid adjustments based on users' commen...

The acceptable noise level (ANL) test, in which individuals indicate what level of noise they are willing to put up with while following speech, has been used to guide hearing aid fitting decisions and has been found to relate to prospective hearing aid use. Unlike objective measures of speech perception ability, ANL outcome is not related to individual hearing loss or age, but rather reflects ...

The design for a multichannel compression hearing aid was developed from previous experimental and theoretical work in our laboratory concerning pitch perception in normal-hearing subjects. The new hearing aid, implemented with off-line digital signal processing, was tested on twenty subjects with sensorineural hearing loss using speech sounds in a background of speech-spectrum noise. Five sign...

The improvement of speech intelligibility in hearing aids is a traditional problem that still remains open and unsolved. Modern devices may include signal processing algorithms to improve intelligibility: automatic gain control, automatic environmental classification or speech enhancement. However, the design of such algorithms is strongly restricted by some engineering constraints caused by th...

BACKGROUND Research suggests that for individuals with significant low-frequency hearing, implantation of a short-electrode cochlear implant may provide benefits of improved speech perception abilities. Because this strategy combines acoustic and electrical hearing within the same ear while at the same time preserving low-frequency residual acoustic hearing in both ears, localization abilities ...