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 ]
Original Primary Outcome: Same as current
Current Secondary Outcome: Speech understanding of signals with targeted spectral change enhancement [ Time Frame: Three years ]
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