Ear and Hearing

OBJECTIVES: Older adults often complain of difficulty in communicating in noisy environments. Contextual information is considered an important cue for identifying everyday speech. To date, it has not been clear exactly how context use (CU) and reliance on context in older adults are affected by hearing status and cognitive function. The present study examined the effects of semantic context on the performance of speech recognition, recall, perceived listening effort (LE), and noise tolerance, and further explored the impacts of hearing loss and working memory capacity on CU and reliance on context among older adults...

OBJECTIVES: This study examined the neural mechanisms by which remote microphone (RM) systems might lead to improved behavioral performance on listening-in-noise tasks in autistic and non-autistic youth. DESIGN: Cortical auditory evoked potentials (CAEPs) were recorded in autistic (n = 25) and non-autistic (n = 22) youth who were matched at the group level on chronological age (M = 14.21 ± 3.39 years) and biological sex. Potentials were recorded during an active syllable identification task completed in quiet and in multi-talker babble noise with and without the use of an RM system...

OBJECTIVES: Age-related speech perception difficulties may be related to a decline in central auditory processing abilities, particularly in noisy or challenging environments. However, how the activation patterns related to speech stimulation in different noise situations change with normal aging has yet to be elucidated. In this study, we aimed to investigate the effects of noisy environments and aging on patterns of auditory cortical activation. DESIGN: We analyzed the functional near-infrared spectroscopy signals of 20 young adults, 21 middle-aged adults, and 21 elderly adults, and evaluated their cortical response patterns to speech stimuli under five different signal to noise ratios (SNRs)...

OBJECTIVES: Hearing aid processing in realistic listening environments is difficult to study effectively. Often the environment is unpredictable or unknown, such as in wearable aid trials with subjective report by the wearer. Some laboratory experiments create listening environments to exert tight experimental control, but those environments are often limited by physical space, a small number of sound sources, or room absorptive properties. Simulation techniques bridge this gap by providing greater experimental control over listening environments, effectively bringing aspects of the real-world into the laboratory...

OBJECTIVES: The uptake of cochlear implants among adults who could benefit (based on pure-tone audiometry) in developed countries is estimated to be less than 10%. Concerns about potential surgical complications, fear of losing residual hearing, and limited awareness about the benefits of this intervention contribute to the low adoption rate. To enhance quality of life and improve the uptake of cochlear implants, it is essential to have a clear understanding of their benefits. DESIGN: This umbrella review aims to summarize the major benefits of cochlear implant usage in adults, by synthesizing findings from published review articles...

OBJECTIVES: Mild traumatic brain injury (TBI) can have persistent effects in the auditory domain (e.g., difficulty listening in noise), despite individuals having normal pure-tone auditory sensitivity. Individuals with a history of mild TBI often perceive hearing difficulty and greater listening effort in complex listening situations. The purpose of the present study was to examine self-perceived hearing difficulty, listening effort, and performance on an auditory processing test battery in adults with a history of mild TBI compared with a control group...

OBJECTIVES: Current approaches for evaluating noise-induced hearing loss (NIHL), such as the International Standards Organization 1999 (ISO) 1999 prediction model, rely mainly on noise energy and exposure time, thus ignoring the intricate time-frequency characteristics of noise, which also play an important role in NIHL evaluation. In this study, an innovative NIHL prediction model based on temporal and spectral feature extraction using an asymmetric convolution algorithm is proposed...

OBJECTIVES: Speech understanding is considered a bimodal and bidirectional process, whereby visual information (i.e., speechreading) and also cognitive functions (i.e., top-down processes) are involved. Therefore, the purpose of the present study is twofold: (1) to investigate the auditory (A), visual (V), and cognitive (C) abilities in normal-hearing individuals, hearing aid (HA) users, and cochlear implant (CI) users, and (2) to determine an auditory, visual, cognitive (AVC)-profile providing a comprehensive overview of a person's speech processing abilities, containing a broader variety of factors involved in speech understanding...

OBJECTIVES: The auditory steady-state response (ASSR) enables hearing threshold estimation based on electroencephalography (EEG) recordings. The choice of stimulus type has an impact on both the detectability and the frequency specificity of the ASSR. Amplitude modulated pure tones provide the most frequency-specific ASSR, but responses to pure tones are weak. The ASSR can be enhanced by increasing the bandwidth of the stimulus, but this comes at the cost of a decrease in the frequency specificity of the measured response...

OBJECTIVES: Our recent empirical findings have shown that the auditory nerve compound action potential (CAP) evoked by a low-level tone burst originates from a narrow cochlear region tuned to the tone burst frequency. At moderate to high sound levels, the origins shift to the most sensitive audiometric regions rather than the extended high-frequency regions of the cochlear base. This means that measurements evoked from extended high-frequency sound stimuli can shift toward the apex with increasing level...

OBJECTIVES: Audiometric testing typically does not include frequencies above 8 kHz. However, recent research suggests that extended high-frequency (EHF) sensitivity could affect hearing in natural communication environments. Clinical assessment of hearing often employs pure tones and frequency-modulated (FM) tones interchangeably regardless of frequency. The present study was designed to evaluate how the stimulus chosen to measure EHF thresholds affects estimates of hearing sensitivity...

OBJECTIVES: Otitis media is one of the most important causes of hearing loss at an early age. Effective vaccination with the routine 7-valent pneumococcal conjugate vaccine (PCV-7) was introduced in 2000. It has been gradually replaced by the pneumococcal nontypeable Haemophilus influenzae protein D conjugate vaccine or the higher-valent 13-valent PCV (PCV-13) since 2010. Data on the change in otitis media burden in recent years are sparse at the global, regional, and national levels...

OBJECTIVES: The ask, inform, manage, encourage, refer (AIMER) program is a behavior change intervention designed to increase the frequency with which hearing healthcare clinicians (HHCs) ask about and provide information regarding mental wellbeing within adult audiology services. The objective of this study was to systematically evaluate the first iteration of the AIMER program to determine whether the intervention achieved the changes in HHC behaviors anticipated and to evaluate feasibility of implementing the AIMER program based on the implementation protocol...

OBJECTIVES: Adults with hearing loss (HL) demonstrate greater benefits of adding visual cues to auditory cues (i.e., "visual enhancement" [VE]) during recognition of speech presented in a combined audiovisual (AV) fashion when compared with normal-hearing peers. For patients with moderate-to-profound sensorineural HL who receive cochlear implants (CIs), it is unclear whether the restoration of audibility results in a decrease in the VE provided by visual cues during AV speech recognition...

OBJECTIVES: The objectives of the present study were to investigate the relationship between wideband absorbance (WBA) and air-bone gap (ABG) in children with a conductive hearing loss (CHL) due to otitis media with effusion (OME) and determine the accuracy of WBA to predict the magnitude of ABGs. DESIGN: This was a prospective, cross-sectional study involving a control group of 170 healthy ears from 130 children (mean age 7.7 years) and a CHL cohort of 181 ears from 176 children (mean age 5...

OBJECTIVES: Empowerment is the process through which individuals with hearing-related challenges acquire and use knowledge, skills and strategies, and increase self-efficacy, participation, and control of their hearing health care, hearing solutions, and everyday lives. The aim was to refine and validate the Empowerment Audiology Questionnaire (EmpAQ), a hearing-specific measure of empowerment. This was achieved through (1) refinement via Rasch analysis (study 1), and (2) traditional psychometric analysis of the final survey structure (study 2)...

OBJECTIVES: In this study, we aimed to describe differences in diagnosis and both auditory and speech/language intervention utilization between children with permanent unilateral hearing loss as compared with bilateral hearing loss. DESIGN: A retrospective cohort study was performed of children evaluated in a multidisciplinary hearing loss clinic at a tertiary care pediatric hospital. Children aged 0 to 18 years with either permanent unilateral or bilateral hearing loss were included...

OBJECTIVES: Motivated by the growing need for hearing screening in China, the present study has two objectives. First, to develop and validate a new test, called the Chinese Zodiac-in-noise (ZIN) test, for large-scale hearing screening in China. Second, to conduct a large-scale remote hearing screening in China, using the ZIN test developed. DESIGN: The ZIN test was developed following a similar procedure as the digits-in-noise test but emphasizes the importance of consonant recognition by employing the 12 zodiac animals in traditional Chinese culture as speech materials...

OBJECTIVES: A method for stimulating the cochlear apex using perimodiolar electrode arrays is described. This method involves implanting an electrode (ECE1) into the helioctrema in addition to standard cochlear implant placement. One objective is to verify a suitable approach for implanting ECE1 in the helicotrema. Another is to determine how placement of ECE1 reshapes electric fields. DESIGN: Two cadaveric half-heads were implanted, and electric voltage tomography was measured with ECE1 placed in many positions...

OBJECTIVES: Several studies have reported the effects of age and gender on the middle ear of adults using wideband acoustic immittance (WAI) that measures middle ear function over a range of frequencies rather than the traditional measures with a single probe tone. Although these results are often based on WAI measurements under ambient pressure, using WAI under varying ear-canal pressures (wideband tympanometry [WBT]) may be able to provide more information about age and gender effects on the middle ear...