INTRODUCTION AND OBJECTIVES Hyperhomocysteinemia as a risk factor for hearing impairment, neuronal damage and cognitive impairment in elderly patients is controversial and is limited by the small number of studies. The aim of this work was determine if elderly patients detected with hyperhomocysteinemia have an increased risk of developing abnormalities in the central auditory processes as comp...

CONCLUSIONS Psychoacoustic functions relating the depth and duration of tinnitus suppression ('residual inhibition') to the center frequency of band-passed noise masking sounds appear to span the region of hearing loss, as do psychoacoustic measurements of the tinnitus spectrum. The results (1) suggest that cortical map reorganization induced by hearing loss is not the principal source of the t...

Threshold of 4.6-ms tone bursts was measured in quiet and in the presence of a 100% sinusoidally amplitude-modulated speech-shaped noise. For the modulated-noise conditions, the onset of the tone burst coincided either with the maximum or the minimum modulator amplitude. The difference in these two masked thresholds provided an indication of the psychoacoustic modulation depth, or the modulatio...

An important function of the auditory nervous system is to analyze the frequency content of environmental sounds. The neural structures involved in determining psychophysical frequency resolution remain unclear. Using a two-noise masking paradigm, the present study investigates the spectral resolution of neural populations in primary auditory cortex (A1) of awake macaques and the degree to whic...

The scientific community has been divided as to the origin of individual differences in perceiving the sounds of a second language (L2). There are two alternative explanations: a general psychoacoustic origin vs. a speech-specific one. A previous study showed that such individual variability is linked to the perceivers' speech-specific capabilities, rather than the perceivers' psychoacoustic ab...

In intonation research, prominence-lending pitch movements have either been described on a linear or on a logarithmic frequency scale. An experiment has been carried out to check whether pitch movements in speech intonation are perceived on one of these two scales or on a psychoacoustic scale representing the frequency selectivity of the auditory system. This last scale is intermediary between ...