Normal-hearing older adults often experience increased difficulties understanding speech in noise. In addition, they benefit less from amplitude fluctuations in the masker. These difficulties may be attributed to an age-related auditory temporal processing deficit. However, a decline in cognitive processing likely also plays an important role. This study examined the relative contribution of de...

Background: Many elderly individuals complain of difficulty in understanding speech in noise despite having normal hearing thresholds. According to previous studies, auditory training leads to improvement in speech-in-noise perception, but these studies did not consider the etiology, so their results cannot be generalized. The present study aimed at investigating the effectiveness of envelope-b...

To scrutinize the binaural contribution to speech-in-noise reception, four groups of elderly participants with or without audiometric asymmetry <2 kHz and with or without near-normal binaural intelligibility level difference (BILD) completed tests of monaural and binaural phase sensitivity as well as cognitive function. Groups did not differ in age, overall degree of hearing loss, or cognitive ...

The study examined whether the benefit of deactivating stimulation sites estimated to have broad neural excitation was attributed to improved spectral resolution in cochlear implant users. The subjects' spatial neural excitation pattern was estimated by measuring low-rate detection thresholds across the array [see Zhou (2016). PLoS One 11, e0165476]. Spectral resolution, as assessed by spectral...

Two hundred and two operations on patients with a congenital ear malformation are presented. Special emphasis is placed on those patients seen in the past three years. The goal of surgery is normal, or near normal, hearing in the operated ear. The surgical approach is direct to the middle ear, and the mastoid air cell system is not opened. Temporalis fascia is used for the new tympanic membrane...

This study investigated the relationship between speech perception performance in spatially complex, lateralized listening scenarios and temporal fine-structure (TFS) coding at low frequencies. Young normal-hearing (NH) and two groups of elderly hearing-impaired (HI) listeners with mild or moderate hearing loss above 1.5 kHz participated in the study. Speech reception thresholds (SRTs) were est...

In many studies, the influence of intelligibility of the interfering speech is avoided by reversing it in time. Usually, intelligibility with time-reversed interfering speech indeed is higher compared to that with normal interfering speech. However, due to the nature of speech, reversed speech also gives rise to increased forward masking. The latter will result in a decrease in intelligibility....