This investigation measured the degree to which hearing aids degrade speech discrimination in noise. Ten normal-hearing subjects were tested for speech reception thresholds (SRT) in noise. The tests were repeated under two aided conditions: one used binaural behind-the-ear (BTE) aids, the other an experimental binaural high-fidelity aid fitted with in-the-ear transducers. To assess the loss of ...

PURPOSE This study investigated whether adults with dyslexia show evidence of a consistent speech perception deficit by testing phoneme categorization and word perception in noise. METHOD Seventeen adults with dyslexia and 20 average readers underwent a test battery including standardized reading, language and phonological awareness tests, and tests of speech perception. Categorization of a p...

With increasing numbers of children and adults receiving bilateral cochlear implants, there is an urgent need for assessment tools that enable testing of binaural hearing abilities. Current test batteries are either limited in scope or are of an impractical duration for routine testing. Here, we report a behavioral test that enables combined testing of speech identification and spatial discrimi...

Do the same mechanisms underlie processing of music and language? Recent investigations of this question have yielded inconsistent results. Likely factors contributing to discrepant findings are use of small samples and failure to control for individual differences in cognitive ability. We investigated the relationship between music and speech prosody processing, while controlling for cognitive...

PAST RESEARCH HAS SHOWN THAT MUSIC and language skills are related in normal-reading children as well as in children with dyslexia. In both an ongoing longitudinal study with normal-reading children and a pilot study with children with dyslexia, we found a strong relationship between musical discrimination abilities and language-related skills. In normal-reading children, musical discrimination...

Practice effects were examined in a masked letter discrimination task and a masked brightness discrimination task for college-age and 60- to 75-year-old subjects. The diffusion model (Ratcliff, 1978) was fit to the response time and accuracy data and used to extract estimates of components of processing from the data. Relative to young subjects, the older subjects began the experiments with slo...

This study was aimed at determining the effects of a chronic modafinil intraperitoneal administration on the rate of learning in a series of five serial spatial discrimination reversals (SSDR) in a T-maze. Results showed that a daily modafinil administration at 64 mg/kg but not at 32 mg/kg induced a faster learning rate as compared to controls. This learning improvement in experimental mice was...