Spoken communication in a non-native language is especially difficult in the presence of noise. This study compared English and Spanish listeners' perceptions of English intervocalic consonants as a function of masker type. Three maskers (stationary noise, multitalker babble, and competing speech) provided varying amounts of energetic and informational masking. Competing English and Spanish spe...

Informational cities are prototypical cities of the knowledge society. If they are informational world cities, they are new centers of power. According to Manuel Castells (1989), in those cities space of flows (flows of money, power, and information) tend to override space of places. Information and communication technology infrastructures, cognitive infrastructures (as groundwork of knowledge ...

A qualitative study was undertaken to explore the role of informational support in relation to health care service use among individuals with cancer. In-depth interviews were conducted with participants (N = 20) newly diagnosed with either breast or prostate cancer receiving radiotherapy from an oncology clinic in Montreal, Quebec. Content analysis revealed that participants' perceptions about ...

Recent research suggests that omnidirectional hearing aids are relatively ineffective at improving speech understanding in everyday conversational speech settings when the background noise contains both energetic and informational masking components. Energetic masking refers to situations where the peripheral (or neural) activity of the target is less than that of the masker, thus making the ta...

BACKGROUND Frailty has been recognized as an important medical syndrome in older adults. Growing literature supports the clinical application of frailty but US older adults' perceptions of frailty have not been explored. We aim to examine perceptions and informational needs about frailty among older adults. METHODS This was a qualitative study involving focus groups of community-dwelling olde...

This report has been prepared for informational purposes only by NEEP staff and does not necessarily represent the view of the NEEP Board of Directors or any entities working in support of NEEP initiatives.

Humans are often generous, even towards strangers encountered by chance and even in the absence of any explicit information suggesting they will meet again. Because game theoretic analyses typically conclude that a psychology designed for direct reciprocity should defect in such situations, many have concluded that alternative explanations for human generosity--explanations beyond direct recipr...

Online newspapers and journals, as well as many other types of informational sites, are invariably confronted with the question of where to place links associated with the online document. Currently, many informational sites place associative links below (as seen with CNN.com) or on the side of the document (as seen with techreview.com), while a shrinking number of sites embed associative links...

Identification of target speech was studied under masked conditions consisting of two or four independent speech maskers. In the reference conditions, the maskers were colocated with the target, the masker talkers were the same sex as the target, and the masker speech was intelligible. The comparison conditions, intended to provide release from masking, included different-sex target and masker ...

OBJECTIVE A literature review was conducted to explore what is already known of surgical patients' informational needs, their opinions about the provision of information and the effect of individualised information. METHODS Computerised searches from 1994 to March 2004 were conducted on MEDLINE, the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews and the Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials...