This research will explore how fast phonemic restoration of degraded speech can be learned. This will be done by training and testing normal-hearing listeners in several sessions with interrupted speech. We will also train a group of normal-hearing…
ID
Source
Brief title
Condition
- Hearing disorders
Synonym
Research involving
Sponsors and support
Intervention
Outcome measures
Primary outcome
The increase in percentage correct of repeated sentences due to training.
Secondary outcome
The effort will be measured through a short questionnaire. A secondary
measurement is of the hearing thresholds.
Background summary
Hearing-impaired listeners and users of hearing aids or Cochlear Implants (CIs)
commonly complain about the difficulties understanding speech in background
noise. Normal-hearing listeners use several mechanisms that help in such
difficult listening environments, such as phonemic restoration, which seem not
to work well with hearing impairment. The hypothesis is that perception of
degraded speech can increase in time by perceptual learning.
Practically, if the hypothesis is proven to be true, (severely)
hearing-impaired listeners can benefit from phonemic restoration by being
trained on missing fractions of speech. Hearing aid manufactures or hearing aid
fitters might take phonemic restoration into account with the fitting
procedure. Theoretically, if the hypothesis is proven to be true, a better
understanding of the *hearing brain* is achieved, contributing to e.g.
computational speech-perception models and functional brain research.
Study objective
This research will explore how fast phonemic restoration of degraded speech can
be learned. This will be done by training and testing normal-hearing listeners
in several sessions with interrupted speech. We will also train a group of
normal-hearing listeners with CI-simulations of interrupted speech and the
CI-users with interrupted speech. From these groups we will determine how
perceptual learning of degraded speech differs with different levels of hearing
impairment.
Study design
The study is designed to be a randomized intervention study. Randomized because
the subjects are placed randomly in a group to listen to either speech
interrupted by silence or by noise. We do match these two groups on age and
gender. The controls are matched on age, gender and the days in the week the
experiments took place for the trained subjects. It is an intervention study
because we train the subjects with audio-, visual feedback, with the aim to
perceive the interrupted sentences better.
Study burden and risks
There are no known risks or benefits associated with the participation in the
experiment. The experiment lasts for about 1.5 hour per day the subject
participates and adequate breaks are built into the experiment.
Hanzeplein 1
Groningen 9713 GZ
NL
Hanzeplein 1
Groningen 9713 GZ
NL
Listed location countries
Age
Inclusion criteria
Normally hearing subjects: hearing threshold better or equal to 20 dB HL for 0.5, 1, 2 and 4 kHz.
Cochlear implant users: post-lingual deaf CI users with a free-field phoneme score better then or equal to 70% at 65 dB SPL.
Exclusion criteria
Normally hearing subjects: inability to participate
CI users: medical complications associated to the implant
Pre-lingual deafness
Design
Recruitment
Followed up by the following (possibly more current) registration
No registrations found.
Other (possibly less up-to-date) registrations in this register
No registrations found.
In other registers
| Register | ID |
|---|---|
| CCMO | NL34501.042.10 |