PURPOSE A small number of studies have explored children's perception of speakers' voice quality and its possible influence on language comprehension. The aim of this explorative study was to investigate the relationship between the examiner's voice quality, the child's performance on a digital version of a language comprehension test, the Test for Reception of Grammar (TROG-2), and two measure...

objectives: the aim of the present study was to assess the auditory lateralization ability in children with (central) auditory processing disorder. methods: participants were divided in two groups: 15 children with central auditory processing disorder (8-10 years) and 80 normal children (8-11 years) from both genders with pure-tone air-conduction thresholds better than 20 db hl bilaterally and ...

Objectives: This study investigated the efficacy of working memory training for improving working memory capacity and related auditory stream segregation in auditory processing disorders children. Methods: Fifteen subjects (9-11 years), clinically diagnosed with auditory processing disorder participated in this non-randomized case-controlled trial. Working memory abilities and auditory strea...

Voice quality assessment is an emergent aspect in Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) network. The evolution of GSM also able in principle to take benefit from end to end services.GSM network inherently include elements such as noisy intermediate equipments that degrade the quality of transmitted voice signal.GSM network presents an alternate method to improve quality and customer exp...

BACKGROUND Chronic pain patients are common in general practice. In this study "chronic pain" is defined as diffuse musculoskeletal pain not due to inflammatory diseases or cancer. Effective patient-physician relations improve treatment results. The relationship between doctors and chronic pain patients is often dysfunctional. Consultation training for physicians and medical students can improv...

Repeated within-day testing on a texture discrimination task leads to retinotopically specific decreases in performance. Although perceptual learning has been shown to be highly specific to the retinotopic location and characteristics of the trained stimulus, the specificity of perceptual deterioration has not been studied. We investigated the similarities between learning and deterioration by ...

The appearance of colors can be affected by their spatiotemporal context. The shift in color appearance according to the surrounding colors is called color induction or chromatic induction; in particular, the shift in opponent color of the surround is called chromatic contrast. To investigate whether chromatic induction occurs even when the chromatic surround is imperceptible, we measured chrom...

Current evidence demonstrates that even though some non-native listeners can achieve native-like performance for speech perception tasks in quiet, the presence of a background noise is much more detrimental to speech intelligibility for non-native compared to native listeners. Even when performance is equated across groups, it is likely that greater listening effort is required for non-native l...

  In order to examine the effects of music on mood, we administered a survey to patients awaiting the preparation of their prescription medicines in pharmacy lounges. Two pharmacies took part in this study, both of which are in a metropolitan area treating fewer than 100 prescription sheets per day. Two hundred and fifty-two patients were divided into two groups: one group listened to backgroun...

Unwanted noises have a negative influence over communication because it disturbs the conversation and make the communication impossible. Speech enhancement algorithms are used for improving the quality and intelligibility or to reduce listener fatigues. Assessment of speech quality can be done by using either subjective listening test or objective quality measure. Evaluation of several objectiv...