Our aim was to study the influence of fatigue development on sensory gating during a muscle load. The fatiguing task was sustained contraction of a handgrip dynamometer with 7 and 30% maximum voluntary contraction (MVC). The suppression of P50, an auditory event-related potential, was used as the sensory gating index in the paired-click paradigm with a 500 ms interstimulus interval; the differe...

Three experiments compared the intelligibilities of helium-speech and normal speech when both were masked by loud noise. Recordings were made of five talkers reading intelligibility word-lists. Several panels of listeners heard these recordings masked by different levels of background noise. In Experiment I, a fatigue effect seemed at first to be present differentially for the helium-speech, su...

OBJECTIVE There is growing interest in the concepts of listening effort and fatigue associated with hearing loss. However, the theoretical underpinnings and clinical meaning of these concepts are unclear. This lack of clarity reflects both the relative immaturity of the field and the fact that research studies investigating listening effort and fatigue have used a variety of methodologies inclu...

Fatigue is a common, but important, patient complaint in a variety of chronic health conditions. Subjective reports from the literature have suggested for many years that fatigue was an important, but overlooked, consequence of hearing loss. Consider this anecdotal report from a person with hearing loss: "I crashed. This letdown wasn't the usual worn-out feeling after a long day. It was pure ex...

OBJECTIVES/HYPOTHESIS To analyze tracheoesophageal voice resistance in laryngectomized patients by comparing the acoustic, perceptive-auditory and self-evaluation measures before and after the voice resistance test. STUDY DESIGN An observational, experimental study with a quantitative and descriptive approach. METHODS Nineteen total laryngectomees were submitted for capture of vocal intensi...

Selective adaption and anchoring effects in speech perception have generated several different hypotheses regarding the nature of contextual contrast, including auditory/phonetic feature detector fatigue, response bias, and auditory contrast. In the present study three different seven-step [hId]-[h epsilon d] continua were constructed to represent a low F0 (long vocal tract source), a high F0 (...

OBJECTIVE There is a lack of research on effects of occupational noise exposure in traditionally female-dominated workplaces. Therefore, the aim of this study was to assess risk of noise-induced hearing-related symptoms among obstetrics personnel. DESIGN A cross-sectional study was performed at an obstetric ward in Sweden including a questionnaire among all employees and sound level measureme...