PURPOSE To verify the speech recognition processes in a monoaural task and in a binaural integration task with dichotic listening, and to compare them to the cognitive processing in elderly subjects pre and post hearing aid acclimatization. METHODS Participants were 60 elderly subjects of both genders, ranging in age from 61 to 85 years. They were evaluated for cognitive aspects by means of t...

OBJECTIVE The purpose of this study was to assess and compare cognitive functioning in adults with unilateral hemispheric injury due to either congenital damage or an ischemic event in young adulthood. METHOD Adults with cerebral palsy resulting from left hemispheric brain damage were compared with adults who had a unilateral stroke in either the left or the right hemisphere. Our primary inte...

The assessment of listening abilities is one of the least understood, least developed and, yet, one of the most important areas of language testing and assessment. It is particularly important because of its potential wash-back effects on classroom practices. Given the fact that listening tests play a great role in assessing the language proficiency of students, they are expected to enjoy a hig...

The purpose of this study was to determine whether listening to Holy Qur'an recitation would augment the beneficial effects of physical exercise on physiological and psychological measures in elderly patients undergoing haemodialysis. Fifty-three male haemodialysis patients were randomly assigned to an intervention group (listening to Holy Qur'an recitation in combination with endurance-resista...

OBJECTIVE The aim of the study was to measure listening effort at typical classroom signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs). DESIGN Listening effort was measured using a dual task paradigm. Participants repeated monosyllabic words presented in a background of children's chatter (primary task) at SNRs that are considered typical of the school classroom environment (quiet, +4, 0, -4 dB) while simultaneou...

Advanced soundscape analysis or machine listening are requiring efficient time frequency decompositions. The recent scattering theory is offering a robust hierarchical convolutional decomposition, nevertheless its kernels need to be fixed. The CNN can be seen as the optimal kernel decomposition, nevertheless it requires large amount of training data. This paper aims to show that Chirplet kernel...

We propose an objective method to assess speech quality in the conversational context by taking into account the talking and listening speech qualities and the impact of delay. This approach is applied to the results of four subjective tests on the effects of echo, delay, packet loss, and noise. The dataset is divided into training and validation sets. For the training set, a multiple linear re...

When listening in noisy conditions, word recognition seems to be much harder in a non-native language than in one’s native language. Native listeners use both word-initial and word-final information for word recognition in clean listening conditions, where word-initial information is the most important. When listening in noise, however, word-final information becomes relatively more important. ...

The effect of concurrent music on gait was investigated amongst Parkinson " s disease (PD) patients and age-matched control subjects. Ten people (mean age 66.6 ± 6.5 years) with idiopathic Parkinson " s disease and ten healthy age-matched (mean age 65.4 ± 6.3 years) control subjects completed steady state gait, dual task and obstacle negotiation trials in two differing test conditions; no music...

In this study, different objective quality measures for the performance prediction of noise reduction schemes are compared to subjective data from psychoacoustic listening tests. It is shown that the considered perceptual measures are appropriate to define a quality test-bench which can be used for the development and optimization of noise reduction schemes.