Trends in Hearing最新文献

Speech-on-speech masking is a common and challenging situation in everyday verbal communication. The ability to segregate competing auditory streams is a necessary requirement for focusing attention on the target speech. The Visual World Paradigm (VWP) provides insight into speech processing by capturing gaze fixations on visually presented icons that reflect the speech signal. This study aimed to propose a new VWP to examine the time course of speech segregation when competing sentences are presented and to collect pupil size data as a measure of listening effort. Twelve young normal-hearing participants were presented with competing matrix sentences (structure "name-verb-numeral-adjective-object") diotically via headphones at four target-to-masker ratios (TMRs), corresponding to intermediate to near perfect speech recognition. The VWP visually presented the number and object words from both the target and masker sentences. Participants were instructed to gaze at the corresponding words of the target sentence without providing verbal responses. The gaze fixations consistently reflected the different TMRs for both number and object words. The slopes of the fixation curves were steeper, and the proportion of target fixations increased with higher TMRs, suggesting more efficient segregation under more favorable conditions. Temporal analysis of pupil data using Bayesian paired sample t-tests showed a corresponding reduction in pupil dilation with increasing TMR, indicating reduced listening effort. The results support the conclusion that the proposed VWP and the captured eye movements and pupil dilation are suitable for objective assessment of sentence-based speech-on-speech segregation and the corresponding listening effort.

Many of our conversations occur in nonideal situations, from the hum of a car to the babble of a cocktail party. Additionally, in conversation, listeners are often required to switch their attention between multiple talkers, which places demands on both auditory and cognitive processes. Speech understanding in such situations appears to be particularly demanding for older adults with hearing impairment. This study examined the effects of age and hearing ability on performance in an online speech recall task. Two target sentences, spoken by the same talker or different talkers, were presented one after the other, analogous to a conversational turn switch. The first target sentence was presented in quiet, and the second target sentence was presented alongside either a noise masker (steady-state speech-shaped noise) or a speech masker (another nontarget sentence). Relative to when the target talker remained the same between sentences, listeners were less accurate at recalling information in the second target sentence when the target talker changed, particularly when the target talker for sentence one became the masker for sentence two. Listeners with poorer speech-in-noise reception thresholds were less accurate in both noise- and speech-masked trials and made more masker confusions in speech-masked trials. Furthermore, an interaction revealed that listeners with poorer speech reception thresholds had particular difficulty when the target talker remained the same. Our study replicates previous research regarding the costs of switching nonspatial attention, extending these findings to older adults with a range of hearing abilities.

Subjective ratings of communication function reflect both auditory sensitivity and the situational, social, and emotional consequences of communication difficulties. Listeners interact with people and their environment differently, have various ways of handling stressful situations, and have diverse communication needs. Therefore, understanding the relationship between auditory and mental health factors is crucial for the holistic diagnosis and treatment of communication difficulty, particularly as mental health and communication function may have bidirectional effects. The goal of this study was to evaluate the degree to which social anxiety and negative affect (encompassing generalized anxiety, depression, and anger) contributed to subjective communication function (hearing handicap) in adult listeners. A cross-sectional online survey was administered via REDCap. Primary measures were brief assessments of social anxiety, negative affect, and subjective communication function measures. Participants were 628 adults (408 women, 220 men), ages 19 to 87 years (mean = 43) living in the United States. Results indicated that individuals reporting higher social anxiety and higher negative affect also reported poorer communication function. Multiple linear regression analysis revealed that both negative affect and social anxiety were significant and unique predictors of subjective communication function. Social anxiety and negative affect both significantly, and uniquely, contribute to how much someone feels a hearing loss impacts their daily communication function. Further examination of social anxiety and negative affect in older adults with hearing loss may help researchers and clinicians understand the complex interactions between mental health and sensory function during everyday communication, in this rapidly growing clinical population.

This nationwide retrospective cohort study examines the association between adults with hearing loss (HL) and subsequent injury risk. Utilizing data from the Taiwan National Health Insurance Research Database (2000-2017), the study included 19,480 patients with HL and 77,920 matched controls. Over an average follow-up of 9.08 years, 18.30% of the 97,400 subjects sustained subsequent all-cause injuries. The injury incidence was significantly higher in the HL group compared to the control group (24.04% vs. 16.86%, p < .001). After adjusting for demographics and comorbidities, the adjusted hazard ratio (aHR) for injury in the HL cohort was 2.35 (95% CI: 2.22-2.49). Kaplan-Meier analysis showed significant differences in injury-free survival between the HL and control groups (log-rank test, p < .001). The increased risk was consistent across age groups (18-64 and ≥65 years), with the HL group showing a higher risk of unintentional injuries (aHR: 2.62; 95% CI: 2.45-2.80), including falls (aHR: 2.83; 95% CI: 2.52-3.17) and traffic-related injuries (aHR: 2.38; 95% CI: 2.07-2.74). These findings highlight an independent association between HL and increased injury risk, underscoring the need for healthcare providers to counsel adult HL patients on preventive measures.

Problems with own-voice sounds are common in hearing aid users. As auditory feedback is used to regulate the voice, it is possible that hearing aid use affects phonation. The aim of this paper is to compare hearing aid users' perception of their own voice with and without hearing aids and any effect on phonation. Eighty-five first-time and 85 experienced hearing aid users together with a control group of 70 completed evaluations of their own recorded and live voice in addition to two external voices. The participants' voice recordings were used for acoustic analysis. The results showed moderate to severe own-voice problems (OVP) in 17.6% of first-time users and 18.8% of experienced users. Hearing condition was a significant predictor of the perception of pitch in external voices and of monotony, lower naturalness, and lower pleasantness in their own live voice. The groups with hearing impairment had a higher mean fundamental frequency (f0) than the control group. Hearing aids decreased the speaking sound pressure level by 2 dB on average. Moreover, acoustic analysis shows a complex relationship between hearing impairment, hearing aids, and phonation and an immediate decrease in speech level when using hearing aids. Our findings support previous literature regarding auditory feedback and voice regulation. The results should motivate clinicians in hearing and voice care to routinely take hearing functions into account when assessing voice problems.

When listening to speech under adverse conditions, listeners compensate using neurocognitive resources. A clinically relevant form of adverse listening is listening through a cochlear implant (CI), which provides a spectrally degraded signal. CI listening is often simulated through noise-vocoding. This study investigated the neurocognitive mechanisms supporting recognition of spectrally degraded speech in adult CI users and normal-hearing (NH) peers listening to noise-vocoded speech, with the hypothesis that an overlapping set of neurocognitive functions would contribute to speech recognition in both groups. Ninety-seven adults with either a CI (54 CI individuals, mean age 66.6 years, range 45-87 years) or age-normal hearing (43 NH individuals, mean age 66.8 years, range 50-81 years) participated. Listeners heard materials varying in linguistic complexity consisting of isolated words, meaningful sentences, anomalous sentences, high-variability sentences, and audiovisually (AV) presented sentences. Participants were also tested for vocabulary knowledge, nonverbal reasoning, working memory capacity, inhibition-concentration, and speed of lexical and phonological access. Linear regression analyses with robust standard errors were performed for speech recognition tasks on neurocognitive functions. Nonverbal reasoning contributed to meaningful sentence recognition in NH peers and anomalous sentence recognition in CI users. Speed of lexical access contributed to performance on most speech tasks for CI users but not for NH peers. Finally, inhibition-concentration and vocabulary knowledge contributed to AV sentence recognition in NH listeners alone. Findings suggest that the complexity of speech materials may determine the particular contributions of neurocognitive skills, and that NH processing of noise-vocoded speech may not represent how CI listeners process speech.

The process of repairing misperceptions has been identified as a contributor to effortful listening in people who use cochlear implants (CIs). The current study was designed to examine the relative cost of repairing misperceptions at earlier or later parts of a sentence that contained contextual information that could be used to infer words both predictively and retroactively. Misperceptions were enforced at specific times by replacing single words with noise. Changes in pupil dilation were analyzed to track differences in the timing and duration of effort, comparing listeners with typical hearing (TH) or with CIs. Increases in pupil dilation were time-locked to the moment of the missing word, with longer-lasting increases when the missing word was earlier in the sentence. Compared to listeners with TH, CI listeners showed elevated pupil dilation for longer periods of time after listening, suggesting a lingering effect of effort after sentence offset. When needing to mentally repair missing words, CI listeners also made more mistakes on words elsewhere in the sentence, even though these words were not masked. Changes in effort based on the position of the missing word were not evident in basic measures like peak pupil dilation and only emerged when the full-time course was analyzed, suggesting the timing analysis adds new information to our understanding of listening effort. These results demonstrate that some mistakes are more costly than others and incur different levels of mental effort to resolve the mistake, underscoring the information lost when characterizing speech perception with simple measures like percent-correct scores.

Wide dynamic range compression (WDRC) and noise reduction both play important roles in hearing aids. WDRC provides level-dependent amplification so that the level of sound produced by the hearing aid falls between the hearing threshold and the highest comfortable level of the listener, while noise reduction reduces ambient noise with the goal of improving intelligibility and listening comfort and reducing effort. In most current hearing aids, noise reduction and WDRC are implemented sequentially, but this may lead to distortion of the amplitude modulation patterns of both the speech and the noise. This paper describes a deep learning method, called Neural-WDRC, for implementing both noise reduction and WDRC, employing a two-stage low-complexity network. The network initially estimates the noise alone and the speech alone. Fast-acting compression is applied to the estimated speech and slow-acting compression to the estimated noise, but with a controllable residual noise level to help the user to perceive natural environmental sounds. Neural-WDRC is frame-based, and the output of the current frame is determined only by the current and preceding frames. Neural-WDRC was compared with conventional slow- and fast-acting compression and with signal-to-noise ratio (SNR)-aware compression using objective measures and listening tests based on normal-hearing participants listening to signals processed to simulate the effects of hearing loss and hearing-impaired participants. The objective measures demonstrated that Neural-WDRC effectively reduced negative interactions of speech and noise in highly non-stationary noise scenarios. The listening tests showed that Neural-WDRC was preferred over the other compression methods for speech in non-stationary noises.

This study used functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) to measure aspects of the speech discrimination ability of sleeping infants. We examined the morphology of the fNIRS response to three different speech contrasts, namely "Tea/Ba," "Bee/Ba," and "Ga/Ba." Sixteen infants aged between 3 and 13 months old were included in this study and their fNIRS data were recorded during natural sleep. The stimuli were presented using a nonsilence baseline paradigm, where repeated standard stimuli were presented between the novel stimuli blocks without any silence periods. The morphology of fNIRS responses varied between speech contrasts. The data were fit with a model in which the responses were the sum of two independent and concurrent response mechanisms that were derived from previously published fNIRS detection responses. These independent components were an oxyhemoglobin (HbO)-positive early-latency response and an HbO-negative late latency response, hypothesized to be related to an auditory canonical response and a brain arousal response, respectively. The goodness of fit of the model with the data was high with median goodness of fit of 81%. The data showed that both response components had later latency when the left ear was the test ear (p < .05) compared to the right ear and that the negative component, due to brain arousal, was smallest for the most subtle contrast, "Ga/Ba" (p = .003).