Perceptual rating and word identification procedures were used to evaluate the efficacy of several digital hearing aid adaptive and nonadaptive noise reduction algorithm parameters. The study included 15 hearing-impaired adults listening to speech at soft, moderate, and loud input levels in quiet, fan noise, and multitalker babble noise. The results suggest that hearing-impaired listeners can m...

Hearing loss has been linked to many types of cognitive decline in adults, including an association between hearing loss severity and dementia. However, it remains unclear whether cortical re-organization associated with hearing loss occurs in early stages of hearing decline and in early stages of auditory processing. In this study, we examined compensatory plasticity in adults with mild-modera...

This paper examines the phenomenon of 'missing' or ‘unintentional silently articulated’ consonants in Israeli Hebrew (IH)-speaking atypical adult and child populations. 'Missing' consonants first appeared in the phonological process of 'Non– Vocalization' (N-V) in eight profoundly ('speech readers') and severely ('hearers') hearing-impaired adults (4 male/4 female-17-45 years old). In N-V the h...

The effects of mild-to-moderate hearing impairment on the perceptual importance of three acoustic correlates of stop consonant place of articulation were examined. Normal-hearing and hearing-impaired adults identified a stimulus set comprising all possible combinations of the levels of three factors: formant transition type (three levels), spectral tilt type (three levels), and abruptness of fr...

Recent studies with adults have suggested that amplification at 4 kHz and above fails to improve speech recognition and may even degrade performance when high-frequency thresholds exceed 50-60 dB HL. This study examined the extent to which high frequencies can provide useful information for fricative perception for normal-hearing and hearing-impaired children and adults. Eighty subjects (20 per...

This paper studies speech data of 45 children with hearing impairment and 79 children with normal hearing in terms of their speech intelligibility, vowel production, and tone production. Age played an important role in the intelligibility scores and vowel space size of the normally hearing group. In contrast, only the word comprehension ability had a significant effect on the intelligibility sc...