JASA express letters最新文献

Two measures of auditory spatial resolution, the minimum audible angle and the minimum audible movement angle, have been obtained in a simulated acoustic environment using Ambisonics sound field reproduction. Trajectories were designed to provide no reliable cues for the spatial discrimination task. Larger threshold angles were found in reverberant compared to anechoic conditions, for stimuli on the side compared to the front, and for moving compared to static stimuli. The effect of reverberation appeared to be independent of the position of the sound source (same relative threshold increase) and was independently present for static and moving sound sources.

A long-standing quest in audition concerns understanding relations between behavioral measures and neural representations of changes in sound intensity. Here, we examined relations between aspects of intensity perception and central neural responses within the inferior colliculus of unanesthetized rabbits (by averaging the population's spike count/level functions). We found parallels between the population's neural output and: (1) how loudness grows with intensity; (2) how loudness grows with duration; (3) how discrimination of intensity improves with increasing sound level; (4) findings that intensity discrimination does not depend on duration; and (5) findings that duration discrimination is a constant fraction of base duration.

Predicting acoustic transmission loss in the SOFAR channel faces challenges, such as excessively complex algorithms and computationally intensive calculations in classical methods. To address these challenges, a deep learning-based underwater acoustic transmission loss prediction method is proposed. By properly training a U-net-type convolutional neural network, the method can provide an accurate mapping between ray trajectories and the transmission loss over the problem domain. Verifications are performed in a SOFAR channel with Munk's sound speed profile. The results suggest that the method has potential to be used as a fast predicting model without sacrificing accuracy.

The perceptual boundary between short and long categories depends on speech rate. We investigated the influence of speech rate on perceptual boundaries for short and long vowel and consonant contrasts by Spanish-English bilingual listeners and English monolinguals. Listeners tended to adapt their perceptual boundaries to speech rates, but the strategy differed between groups, especially for consonants. Understanding the factors that influence auditory processing in this population is essential for developing appropriate assessments of auditory comprehension. These findings have implications for the clinical care of older populations whose ability to rely on spectral and/or temporal information in the auditory signal may decline.

Bimodal stimulation, a cochlear implant (CI) in one ear and a hearing aid (HA) in the other, provides highly asymmetrical inputs. To understand how asymmetry affects perception and memory, forward and backward digit spans were measured in nine bimodal listeners. Spans were unchanged from monotic to diotic presentation; there was an average two-digit decrease for dichotic presentation with some extreme cases of decreases to zero spans. Interaurally asymmetrical decreases were not predicted based on the device or better-functioning ear. Therefore, bimodal listeners can demonstrate a strong ear dominance, diminishing memory recall dichotically even when perception was intact monaurally.

Machine learning enabled auscultating diagnosis can provide promising solutions especially for prescreening purposes. The bottleneck for its potential success is that high-quality datasets for training are still scarce. An open auscultation dataset that consists of samples and annotations from patients and healthy individuals is established in this work for the respiratory diagnosis studies with machine learning, which is of both scientific importance and practical potential. A machine learning approach is examined to showcase the use of this new dataset for lung sound classifications with different diseases. The open dataset is available to the public online.

Adding to limited research on clear speech in tone languages, productions of Mandarin lexical tones were examined in pentasyllabic sentences. Fourteen participants read sentences imagining a hard-of-hearing addressee or a friend in a casual social setting. Tones produced in clear speech had longer duration, higher intensity, and larger F0 values. This style effect was rarely modulated by tone, preceding tonal context, or syllable position, consistent with an overall signal enhancement strategy. Possible evidence for tone enhancement was observed only in one set of analysis for F0 minimum and F0 range, contrasting tones with low targets and tones with high targets.

This study evaluated whether adaptive training with time-compressed speech produces an age-dependent improvement in speech recognition in 14 adult cochlear-implant users. The protocol consisted of a pretest, 5 h of training, and a posttest using time-compressed speech and an adaptive procedure. There were significant improvements in time-compressed speech recognition at the posttest session following training (>5% in the average time-compressed speech recognition threshold) but no effects of age. These results are promising for the use of adaptive training in aural rehabilitation strategies for cochlear-implant users across the adult lifespan and possibly using speech signals, such as time-compressed speech, to train temporal processing.