Clinical Trial: Spectral Dynamics and Speech Understanding by Hearing Impaired People

Study Status: Completed
Recruit Status: Completed
Study Type: Observational

Official Title: Spectral Dynamics and Speech Understanding by Hearing Impaired People

Brief Summary: The purpose of this program of research is to understand the perception of the dynamic spectral properties of speech by hearing-impaired listeners, with the long-term goal of improving speech understanding by these individuals in adverse listening conditions. The proposed research compares the performance of normally-hearing and hearing-impaired listeners on measures of speech understanding in the presence of different types of signal distortion and speech understanding of signals with enhanced spectral dynamics. A computational model based on the amount of potential information available in speech will be used to quantify differences in speech intelligibility due to hearing status and stimulus characteristics.

Detailed Summary: This is a behavioral study of human auditory perception. Each experiment in this study involves prospective data collection from three types of listeners. The experimental listeners will be people with sensorineural hearing loss and the control listeners will either be subjects with normal hearing or normal-hearing listeners for whom hearing loss will be simulated through the use of a spectrally-shaped broadband noise. The tasks of the subjects in this study involve either listening to synthesized sounds over earphones while seated comfortably in a sound-treated booth, and making responses indicating the subject's auditory perception of these sounds by touching specific areas on a touch-screen terminal; or, listening to recorded, acoustically modified syllables, words, or sentences over earphones and making responses indicating the subject's identification.
Sponsor: VA Office of Research and Development

Current Primary Outcome: Perception of spectral change in speech [ Time Frame: Three years ]

The experimental approach compares speech identification performance among normal hearing listeners, hearing-impaired listeners, and normal hearing listeners with simulated hearing impairment. Tasks will be carried out in quiet and in the presence of 2 levels of continuous, speech-shaped background noise. Experimental metrics will be percentage of correct/incorrect speech identification and patterns of response confusions. Error rates and error patterns will be compared among the three listener groups. Performance will also be interpreted relative to the output of a computational model.


Original Primary Outcome: Same as current

Current Secondary Outcome: Speech understanding of signals with targeted spectral change enhancement [ Time Frame: Three years ]

The experimental approach compares speech identification performance among normal hearing listeners, hearing-impaired listeners, and normal hearing listeners with simulated hearing impairment for stimuli that have been enhanced in the frequency region of the second formant. Tasks will be carried out in quiet and in the presence of two levels of continuous, speech-shaped background noise. Experimental metrics will be percentage of correct/incorrect speech identification and patterns of response confusions.


Original Secondary Outcome: Same as current

Information By: VA Office of Research and Development

Dates:
Date Received: May 20, 2013
Date Started: August 2013
Date Completion:
Last Updated: November 21, 2016
Last Verified: November 2016