scholarly journals Age-Related Performance on Vowel Identification and the Spectral-temporally Modulated Ripple Test in Children With Normal Hearing and With Cochlear Implants

2018 ◽  
Vol 22 ◽  
pp. 233121651877095 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mishaela DiNino ◽  
Julie G. Arenberg
Author(s):  
Changxin Zhang ◽  
Mingying Li ◽  
Jie Yu ◽  
Chang Liu

Purpose Depicting the development pattern of vowel perception for children with normal hearing (NH) and cochlear implants (CIs) would be useful for clinicians and school teachers to monitor children's auditory rehabilitation. The study was to investigate the development of Mandarin Chinese vowel perception for Mandarin Chinese native–speaking children with the ages of 4–6 years. Method Vowel identification of children with NH and CIs were tested. All children with CIs received CIs before the age of 4 years. In a picture identification task with Mandarin Chinese speech stimuli, listeners identified the target consonant–vowel word among two to four contrastive words that differed only in vowels. Each target word represented a concrete object and was spoken by a young female native Mandarin Chinese talker. The target words included 16 monophthongs, 22 diphthongs, and nine triphthongs. Results Children with NH showed significantly better identification of monophthongs and diphthongs than children with CIs at the age of 6 years, whereas the two groups had comparable performance at age of 4 and 5 years. Children with NH significantly outperformed children with CIs for triphthong identification across all three age groups. For children with NH, a rapid development of perception of all three types of vowels occurred between age 4 and 5 years with a rapid development only for monophthong perception between age 5 and 6 years. For children with CIs, a rapid development of both diphthong and triphthong perception occurred between 4 and 5 years old, but not monophthong, with no significant development between 5 and 6 years old for all three types of vowels. Overall, Mandarin-speaking children with NH achieved their ceiling performance in vowel perception before or at the age of 6 years, whereas children with CIs may need more time to reach the typical level of their peers with NH. Conclusions The development of Mandarin vowel perception for Mandarin-native children differed between preschool-age children with NH and CIs, likely due to the deficits of spectral processing for children with CIs. The results would be a supplement to the development of speech recognition in Mandarin-native children with NH and CIs.


2020 ◽  
Vol Publish Ahead of Print ◽  
Author(s):  
Benson Cheng-Lin Hsu ◽  
Filiep Vanpoucke ◽  
Margreet Langereis ◽  
Ann Dierckx ◽  
Astrid van Wieringen

2019 ◽  
Vol 28 (4) ◽  
pp. 986-992 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lisa R. Park ◽  
Erika B. Gagnon ◽  
Erin Thompson ◽  
Kevin D. Brown

Purpose The aims of this study were to (a) determine a metric for describing full-time use (FTU), (b) establish whether age at FTU in children with cochlear implants (CIs) predicts language at 3 years of age better than age at surgery, and (c) describe the extent of FTU and length of time it took to establish FTU in this population. Method This retrospective analysis examined receptive and expressive language outcomes at 3 years of age for 40 children with CIs. Multiple linear regression analyses were run with age at surgery and age at FTU as predictor variables. FTU definitions included 8 hr of device use and 80% of average waking hours for a typically developing child. Descriptive statistics were used to describe the establishment and degree of FTU. Results Although 8 hr of daily wear is typically considered FTU in the literature, the 80% hearing hours percentage metric accounts for more variability in outcomes. For both receptive and expressive language, age at FTU was found to be a better predictor of outcomes than age at surgery. It took an average of 17 months for children in this cohort to establish FTU, and only 52.5% reached this milestone by the time they were 3 years old. Conclusions Children with normal hearing can access spoken language whenever they are awake, and the amount of time young children are awake increases with age. A metric that incorporates the percentage of time that children with CIs have access to sound as compared to their same-aged peers with normal hearing accounts for more variability in outcomes than using an arbitrary number of hours. Although early FTU is not possible without surgery occurring at a young age, device placement does not guarantee use and does not predict language outcomes as well as age at FTU.


2018 ◽  
Vol 120 (6) ◽  
pp. 2939-2952 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samira Anderson ◽  
Robert Ellis ◽  
Julie Mehta ◽  
Matthew J. Goupell

The effects of aging and stimulus configuration on binaural masking level differences (BMLDs) were measured behaviorally and electrophysiologically, using the frequency-following response (FFR) to target brainstem/midbrain encoding. The tests were performed in 15 younger normal-hearing (<30 yr) and 15 older normal-hearing (>60 yr) participants. The stimuli consisted of a 500-Hz target tone embedded in a narrowband (50-Hz bandwidth) or wideband (1,500-Hz bandwidth) noise masker. The interaural phase conditions included NoSo (tone and noise presented interaurally in-phase), NoSπ (noise presented interaurally in-phase and tone presented out-of-phase), and NπSo (noise presented interaurally out-of-phase and tone presented in-phase) configurations. In the behavioral experiment, aging reduced the magnitude of the BMLD. The magnitude of the BMLD was smaller for the NoSo–NπSo threshold difference compared with the NoSo–NoSπ threshold difference, and it was also smaller in narrowband compared with wideband conditions, consistent with previous measurements. In the electrophysiology experiment, older participants had reduced FFR magnitudes and smaller differences between configurations. There were significant changes in FFR magnitude between the NoSo to NoSπ configurations but not between the NoSo to NπSo configurations. The age-related reduction in FFR magnitudes suggests a temporal processing deficit, but no correlation was found between FFR magnitudes and behavioral BMLDs. Therefore, independent mechanisms may be contributing to the behavioral and neural deficits. Specifically, older participants had higher behavioral thresholds than younger participants for the NoSπ and NπSo configurations but had equivalent thresholds for the NoSo configuration. However, FFR magnitudes were reduced in older participants across all configurations. NEW & NOTEWORTHY Behavioral and electrophysiological testing reveal an aging effect for stimuli presented in wideband and narrowband noise conditions, such that behavioral binaural masking level differences and subcortical spectral magnitudes are reduced in older compared with younger participants. These deficits in binaural processing may limit the older participant's ability to use spatial cues to understand speech in environments containing competing sound sources.


Author(s):  
Juyong Chung

A number of studies have demonstrated a significant association between age-related hearing loss (ARHL) and cognitive decline. However their relationship is not clear. In this review, we focused on the etiological mechanisms between ARHL and cognitive decline to explain the nature of this relationship: 1) causal mechanisms (e.g., cognitive load hypothesis, cascade hypothesis); 2) common cause mechanisms (e.g., microvascular disease); 3) overdiagnosis or harbinger hypothesis. We conclude that no single mechanism is sufficient and hearing and cognition related to each other in several different ways. In addition, we reviewed the effectiveness of hearing intervention (e.g., hearing aids and cochlear implants) on cognition function, and the role of hearing aid use and cochlear implant depends on the relevant mechanism.


Author(s):  
Paris Binos

Vocants are precursors to speech and are facially neutral. The presence of these speechlike vocalizations was evident during the precursors to mature phonology called “protophones”. The prosodic feature of duration of the nuclei plays a crucial role in the shift of prelexical to mature speech, since speech intelligibility is closely related to the control of duration. The aim of this work is to determine whether cochlear implants (CIs) positively trigger language acquisition and the development of verbal skills. Recent literature findings are compared and discussed with the performance of two Greek congenitally hearing-impaired infants who were matched with three normal-hearing (NH) infants. This work highlighted an important weakness of the prosodic abilities of young infants with CIs.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-10
Author(s):  
Ward R. Drennan

<b><i>Introduction:</i></b> Normal-hearing people often have complaints about the ability to recognize speech in noise. Such disabilities are not typically assessed with conventional audiometry. Suprathreshold temporal deficits might contribute to reduced word recognition in noise as well as reduced temporally based binaural release of masking for speech. Extended high-frequency audibility (&#x3e;8 kHz) has also been shown to contribute to speech perception in noise. The primary aim of this study was to compare conventional audiometric measures with measures that could reveal subclinical deficits. <b><i>Methods:</i></b> Conventional and extended high-frequency audiometry was done with 119 normal-hearing people ranging in age from 18 to 72. The ability to recognize words in noise was evaluated with and without differences in temporally based spatial cues. A low-uncertainty, closed-set word recognition task was used to limit cognitive influences. <b><i>Results:</i></b> In normal-hearing listeners, word recognition in noise ability decreases significantly with increasing pure-tone average (PTA). On average, signal-to-noise ratios worsened by 5.7 and 6.0 dB over the normal range, for the diotic and dichotic conditions, respectively. When controlling for age, a significant relationship remained in the diotic condition. Measurement error was estimated at 1.4 and 1.6 dB for the diotic and dichotic conditions, respectively. Controlling for both PTA and age, EHF-PTAs showed significant partial correlations with SNR50 in both conditions (<i>ρ</i> = 0.30 and 0.23). Temporally based binaural release of masking worsened with age by 1.94 dB from 18 to 72 years old but showed no significant relationship with either PTA. <b><i>Conclusions:</i></b> All three assessments in this study demonstrated hearing problems independently of those observed in conventional audiometry. Considerable degradations in word recognition in noise abilities were observed as PTAs increased within the normal range. The use of an efficient words-in-noise measure might help identify functional hearing problems for individuals that are traditionally normal hearing. Extended audiometry provided additional predictive power for word recognition in noise independent of both the PTA and age. Temporally based binaural release of masking for word recognition decreased with age independent of PTAs within the normal range, indicating multiple mechanisms of age-related decline with potential clinical impact.


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